


Away With Us He's Going

by onstraysod



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Faery abduction, M/M, Minor Violence, minor horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-01
Updated: 2016-06-01
Packaged: 2018-07-11 12:02:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 25,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7050082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lord Brendol Hux II has just inherited his father's title and his uncle's estate, Arkanis Manor, in the north of England. But when he orders workmen to remove the trees on a strange hill on his property, Hux discovers that he is not the only lord ruling over the land. Kylo Ren, king of the mysterious Sith, threatens retribution unless Hux humbles himself and shows the proper respect for his people. But despite his fear - and his undeniable attraction to Ren - Hux is not a man to be easily conquered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Moon is Taking Flight

**Author's Note:**

> Gorgeously illustrated by [Parasitebeans](http://parasitebeans.tumblr.com), to whom I am eternally grateful!
> 
> The titles of each chapter are taken from William Butler Yeats's _The Stolen Child_.

Halfway through his first supper as the master of Arkanis Manor - a mediocre meal at best, reminding Lord Hux that he should replace the whole of his uncle’s old staff at his earliest convenience - he glanced up and noticed the painting. It hung on the opposite wall from where he sat at the head of the long wooden table, above the hearth where a fire crackled for - though it was spring - the nights this far north were chilly and the old house vast and full of drafts. Hux was no aficionado of art - he preferred books, rare volumes bound in identical calfskin covers, lined on their shelves in perfect symmetry - but it seemed even to him a bizarre painting. It depicted a small clearing in a dark, tangled wood, vines and undergrowth running riot at the feet of pale, slender birch trees. Peering from the interwoven leaves and skeletal branches of this wood were what seemed to be innumerable faces: strange and inhuman, ghastly white with large blank, black eyes. Some of the faces were prominent while others seemed to fade into the darkness of the background, becoming less shapes formed of paint and more like tricks of the observer’s imagination.

But what made the painting particularly odd was the central figure, so incongruous in such a scene, so out of place lying in a tangled nest of nettles and thorns. A child, an infant: pale and black-haired, bundled up in a plain, homespun blanket. An unnervingly solemn-looking baby with mirthless, staring black eyes. White hands with unnaturally long fingers and black palms reached out towards the child from the shadows of the surrounding undergrowth: spindly, disembodied hands, stretching out as if to snatch up the small creature and whisk it away.

“That’s rather a peculiar painting,” Hux said, pointing with his fork and addressing the footman who stood unobtrusively nearby. “Not something I would have thought my dreary old uncle would have kept on his wall. What’s the meaning of it?”

The footman glanced in the direction Hux pointed toward, then quickly averted his eyes as if the painting were not something he wished to long consider. “Strange tales are told in these parts, my lord,” he said in a stately drawl. “Strange legends. That painting is thought to depict one of them. It is said that many years ago there was a child, a male child, from this area, who was snatched from his father’s cottage in the night. Taken away by the hidden ones, to be their king.”

Hux gazed at the man as he took a sip of wine. Now the wine, at least, was very good indeed: an old vintage, stored away for decades in the cellar among dust and cobwebs. It was one thing of his uncle’s he would not need to scrap.

“I beg your pardon?” he asked. “The what?”

The footman hesitated. He seemed uncomfortable speaking on the present subject, or speaking at all. “The hidden people, my lord. The ancient ones who are said to dwell beneath the hills, who ride out in the dawn and the dusk and at midnight when Christian folk are sleeping. There’s a great many names for them, though it’s thought unwise to speak them: they take offense at such things. But around here they are most commonly known as the Sith.”

Hux regarded the man in silence for a moment. Then he burst out laughing. A soft, cruel laugh, as strange to Hux’s own ears as it was to the footman, who gaped nervously at his new master. It had been some time since Hux had last had an inclination to laugh: it made him feel almost grateful for such foolishness.

“What absolute nonsense!” he said, downing the rest of his wine. “You aren’t seriously suggesting that people believe such humbug anymore, are you?”

“Forgive me, my lord, but — yes, I am afraid that the simple people around here do indeed believe in such things.” The man cleared his throat and Hux noticed him unobtrusively cross and uncross two of his fingers, an old sign warding against the evil eye. Hux sighed.

“Well that is disappointing.” He wiped his mouth on a napkin, then threw the cloth upon his plate and rose. “Tell cook that I like my meat medium-rare, not charred until it resembles the log from last night’s fire.”

“Yes, my lord. And the painting, my lord? If it displeases you, I can have it removed.”

Hux paused, looking again at the ghostly white faces peeking from between the trees, the sad-eyed child laying swaddled in their midst. “No, no. Leave it. It’s absurd. I like absurd things.”

It was true: absurd things did amuse him. But the folly of superstition did not. It was like a disease, this kind of ignorance: it did not surprise him that he might find it in his tenants here, but in his uncle’s servants? He would have thought the old man, dull as he was, would have hired help of somewhat greater intelligence. The danger was that, like any disease, it could spread, infecting the servants he had brought up with him from London. Not all of them, perhaps. But Mitaka? Mitaka was already showing signs of cracking. 

****

It had started earlier that day, on the journey north. They had paused at dusk for a short rest at a wayside inn and the old man in the stable yard, inquiring about their destination and the route they would take, had warned them against going on.

"Best to wait and start the last stage of your journey on the morrow," the old man had said, muttering the words around the battered pipe stem he held clenched in his teeth. "Round here e'ryone knows not to travel through them woods at night. Some as have never come back out again.”

Hux had smiled tightly, his ordinary smile — the kind that never reached his eyes. "I shall consider myself duly warned," he’d said, then in the next breath had ordered his coachman to make ready. He’d wanted to reach the estate in time for a late supper.

It could have waited until the morning. The whole journey north from London could have waited, he supposed. But Brendol Hux II was not a man who liked to wait. He had waited long enough for his old man to die, waited long enough to inherit his title, waited long enough to take possession of his uncle's old country estate. Yes he was still young; yes the old manor was still being kept by his uncle's old servants and would presumably continue to operate as it had since the reign of Henry V without need of his immediate occupancy. But His Lordship was tired of waiting. Now that he had something that was his – something that was all his to order and improve and control - he would take it in his hands and hold it and brook no further delay to the exertion of his will.

The sun had set several hours before they entered the old forest that stretched across the road a dozen miles south of the estate. But they had had the illumination of the moon in the open countryside, a full spring moon heavy with clear light. Once the carriage entered the woods the moon was lost to them, broken shards of light only once and awhile stabbing through the canopy of tangled branches overhead. Hux was unperturbed, dozing a bit until woken when a wheel jerked free of a pothole, rattling the whole carriage. But Dopheld Mitaka, his valet and personal assistant, was not coping quite so well. Ever since entering the forest Hux had noticed that Mitaka's posture in the seat across from him had become more rigid and tense.

There was a sudden loud thump against the side of the carriage, and a bony finger ran its nail across the glass of the window with a screech. Mitaka cried out and jumped several inches. Hux laughed.

"What has gotten into you, man?" he asked, glancing at the slender branches whipping the carriage. The driver had shifted the conveyance to the side of the road and the young birches and ash trees that grew there in thick disarray were scraping at its side. If it took much toll on the paint, Hux thought, he would have the coachman flogged.

"Forgive me, my lord," Mitaka stammered. "It startled me, is all.”

"You've been clutching those cushions since we entered the forest," Hux said coolly, nodding toward Mitaka's hands. They gripped the plush velvet seat beneath him hard enough to whiten his knuckles. "Don't tell me you're afraid of the dark.”

"No, of course not, my lord," Mitaka said, his tone rather indignant. "It-- It's just--"

"Just what?”

Mitaka might have answered, had he been given the chance. But at that moment the carriage came to a shuddering stop, throwing Hux from his seat and almost into his valet's lap. One of the horses gave a sharp scream and the coachman's raised voice could be heard yelling indecipherable words at the beast. If the trembling of the carriage was any indication, the man was having a difficult time getting the animal back under control.

"What in God's name is going on?" Hux snapped, pushing himself back into his seat. "Mitaka, get out there and demand an explanation!”

"Y--yes sir." Mitaka showed no great inclination to step outside the carriage, but Hux's tone did not suggest that any hesitancy on his part would be appreciated. He scrambled out, leaving the door slightly ajar, tendrils of cool night air entering the carriage to brush against Hux's boots.

Several minutes passed, in which Hux could hear the murmuring of voices without discerning any words. Knowing Mitaka he had most likely lapsed into a casual conversation with the man, Hux thought: he's probably asking after his wife and children. Fidgeting with impatience, Hux opened the door on his side and jumped down from the carriage.

"What's the meaning of all this?" he demanded. The coachman had descended from his perch and was holding the left of the pair of horses by the bridle, stroking its neck with his other hand, while Mitaka stood nearby, gazing nervously into the woods. 

"Horse took a fright at something, sir," the coachman said. "We'd just come around that curve back there and she jumped up and screamed and pawed at the air like she'd seen something. This one's taken all jittery too," he said, indicating the other horse, "though I can't see what's got them so worked up.”

The road - a mere dirt track, badly scarred by holes and fissures - was empty as far as Hux could peer into the darkness. Admittedly this was not far: the forest closed in on both sides, the boughs of the old oaks and elms and chestnuts meeting and tangling overhead like the vaulted roof of a long abandoned cathedral. The trees and the undergrowth between their trunks made an almost impenetrable wall on either side of the road, but through the occasional opening Hux could only glimpse a thin mist weaving its way through a yet deeper darkness.

"Well you had best get them both under control and back under way immediately," Hux ordered. "I should not like having to shoot them both. Going the rest of the way on foot would be most fatiguing.”

"Yes, my lord," the coachman answered, his expression rather aghast in the dim light of the carriage lamps. "I'll do so straight away, sir.”

"Come Mitaka." Hux turned on his heel, gesturing for his servant to follow. He had just reached the door of the carriage when he stopped suddenly, his attention arrested by something in the woods to his right. Out of the corner of his eye Hux thought he had seen movement there, a shape darting through the gap between two massive oak boles. But no - there was nothing, just blackness and the leaves of a hazel stirred by the cold night breeze. Or had it been a flash of white he'd seen, the light of the lamps reflected in a pair of eyes? Hux shook his head. Mitaka’s skittishness was affecting him. He had seen that faint white mist hanging in the air beneath the interwoven branches - nothing more.

"Are you all right, sir?" Mitaka asked, resuming his seat across from Hux. There was the sharp snap of the coachmen's whip, a side-to-side rocking of the carriage, and they were back in forward motion. 

"Of course I'm all right. Why shouldn't I be?”

Mitaka made no answer, shivering violently instead. "There's something about this forest, sir. It's-- unnatural. Did you hear it, when you stood out there? I did.”

"Hear what?”

Mitaka winced slightly. Hux’s tone was sharper than the whip that cracked again outside. "The-- well, my lord, I could have sworn I heard--"

"Spit it out, man!”

"Laughter, sir," Mitaka spluttered. "Laughter, or-- wailing. Or something in between the two. Maybe it was music. Sometimes distant, sometimes close, but all around us, like the whole forest was filled with--" He stopped and swallowed audibly. 

"Good God, Mitaka." Hux shook his head. "You overhear some nonsense spoken by an ignorant old peasant at a wayside inn and you take a fright from it. I should have the carriage stopped and you pitched out on the road.”

"No, sir! Please!" Mitaka eyes flashed wide and panicked in the gloom. "I-- I am sure it was just my imagination.”

"I should say so. Get a hold on it or you'll find yourself back in London without a position.”

"Yes, my lord. Thank you, my lord," Mitaka murmured.

Hux sat silently for a moment, then reached over and lowered the shade, blocking the shadowy view of the passing woods. The last thing he needed as he embarked upon his new life as master of Arkanis Manor was his servant suffering a nervous breakdown. They sat in almost complete darkness and the remainder of the journey passed without incident.

****

No, it was most definitely something Hux would have to nip in the bud, this absurd superstition about hidden people, children snatched away in the night. He couldn’t clean it out of the county, certainly, but he could dismiss any of his staff who showed signs of believing it, and in such a way as to send a clear signal to the rest. Such old-fashioned, simplistic nonsense would not be tolerated in his halls.

Taking a candle, Hux headed upstairs for his first night’s sleep in the master bedroom. Mitaka had already been to prepare the chamber: tapers were lit around the room, the fire had been stoked, the bed turned down and his nightshirt and dressing gown laid out upon the coverlet. These were not ordinarily the duties of a personal assistant and valet, but Hux trusted Mitaka: not his sense, by any means, but his discretion and his almost pathetic need to please. On the pillows stacked at the head of the canopy bed lay Hux’s ginger cat, Millicent, curled into a tight and cozy ball. She mewled as Hux scratched her ears.

“I see you’ve already made yourself at home. Well rightfully so. You are the new lady of the house, after all.” Hux began to undress, pausing only to watch Millicent as she suddenly sat up and flicked forward her ears in the direction of the windows across the room.

“What is it?” Hux walked over and pushed aside the curtains. His lands - and he repeated that thought to himself with pleasure: _his lands_ \- lay under a darkness cut by shreds of mists that hung low over the ground, catching and holding the gleam of the descending moon. The park was broad and cleared of trees except for an occasional stately oak or chestnut, but at the far end of the park, rising sharply in isolation, was a hill crowned with a thick wood. The trees grew so tightly clustered and tangled that the moonlight could not pierce the blackness between their boughs.

Millicent was standing now upon the coverlet, hissing, her back humped up and the fur at her neck erect and bristling. “Oh not you as well!” Hux cried, and the cat shot off the top of the bed and, in the blink of an eye, disappeared behind the dust ruffle at its base.

“Fine. Have it your own way. I shall sleep in perfect comfort without you hogging all the space.” Hux finished changing into his night clothes, then went about the room snuffing out the candles. The fire continued to burn low in the hearth, warming the room with a soft reddish glow. The journey had tired him, and he had a busy day planned for the morrow: surveying his lands, dismissing those of his uncle’s old staff that he found wanting. He closed his eyes and had almost passed from consciousness to dream when he heard it: what Millicent must have heard sooner, reaching her finely tuned ears from much farther away.

Music. An eerie, tuneless sort of music, like a vibration on the air, almost imperceptible to human hearing. It rose and fell and rose again, each note weirdly out of unison, but all belonging to the same instrument, or to a great many instruments of the same type. Was it an instrument? If it were, it was one with which Hux was unacquainted. Or was it a voice - many, many voices - raised in some unearthly, wavering yowl? A shiver passed along the column of Hux’s spine. He despised himself for it.

Millicent was still hissing from somewhere beneath the bed. Hux took an extra pillow and put it over his head. 

“It’s nothing. Most likely the wind under the eaves, or in the old chimney stacks my uncle probably neglected to ever have cleaned.” He said it all to Millicent, as if she could understand his words, as if she was the one who needed the reassurance. “It’s nothing at all.”


	2. The World is Full of Troubles

On his first full day as lord of the manor, Hux rose early and ordered two horses to be saddled, his own and one of his uncle’s for Mitaka to ride. After breakfast – a somewhat more acceptable meal than the previous supper - the two of them rode out to survey the property. Hux’s horse, a tall and mighty charger, was named Executor for the darkness of his sleek coat, which had reminded Hux of the attire of a public hangman. The color was actually a dark walnut, but out of direct sunlight it appeared almost black, and the horse’s behavior fit his impressive appearance: he stood under the reins with his regal neck held high, his tail flipping imperiously as he stamped his massive hooves. Mitaka’s mare, by contrast, seemed hardly inured to the bit and was constantly stepping sideways and threatening to toss her nervous rider from the saddle. It gave Hux no end of amusement to watch Mitaka’s ineffective efforts to get the beast under control.

At the top of a rise behind the house Hux reined in his mount and took in the view of his expansive property. The park was several miles wide, a swath of gently undulating green, dotted with the occasional tree and pond and, on the edge of the largest of these, a Georgian folly built of fitted white stone. All in all it was a pleasing sight, a vista worthy of him, but there was one thing that irked Hux. That odd hill at the end of the park, standing all alone: a green mound with gently sloping sides, not tall, but crowned with that thick growth of oak and ash trees. Trees of an immense age by the look of them, with thick trunks and massive branches that tangled and threaded together, casting the top of the hill in a perpetual twilight, the ground at their roots an impenetrable mass of thorns. No care had been taken to prune or manage this little wilderness and Hux was perplexed by the oversight: his uncle would have seen the mound each time he gazed out the many glazed windows at the front of the house, for the hill stood on a direct line from it. To Hux’s mind it was an unfortunate blight in an otherwise neat and orderly landscape.

“Mitaka, ride down and inform the gardener to gather some laborers. I want that hill cleared of trees.”

Mitaka’s mare was tossing her head rather violently and managed to whip the reins from the man’s sweat-damp grasp. He had to scramble to fetch them up again and it took him a moment to respond to Hux’s order. “Now, my lord?”

“Yes now. I like an unobstructed view and that hill is an eyesore. These tenants and servants of my uncle’s have been allowed to be idle for too long. Do them good to be put to some useful work.”

Mitaka stared uncertainly at Hux for a moment, then looked down at his misbehaving mount. “Sir, I’m not sure--"

“Well go on then!” Hux cried, slapping the mare on the rump with his riding crop. The horse whinnied and leapt off all four hooves, bounding down the slope at a wild gallop, Mitaka giving a little scream and throwing his arms around the horse’s neck to keep on its back. Hux tilted back his head and laughed heartily as he watched Mitaka just barely manage to cling to the saddle until he reached the bottom of the slope.

He had not long returned to the house and was engaged in examining his uncle’s library - a rather poor collection of volumes, he felt, comprised of too many unimportant works on obscure local topics - when Mitaka returned. He had apparently been thrown from the saddle at some point, for bits of grass and straw clung to his coat and hair; Hux was particularly disappointed not to have witnessed the event.

“Well?” He slid a cloth-bound folio back onto its shelf. “Have they gathered their axes and saws?”

Mitaka cleared his throat. “They say they cannot do so, my lord.”

Hux stared at Mitaka for a moment, as if he could not understand the words the man was saying. “Cannot? Or will not? What kind of lazy, worthless--"

“No, my lord, it isn’t that. They are eager to work. It’s just…” Mitaka shifted from one foot to the other and avoided Hux’s eyes. “They say, my lord, that— that to cut down the trees on that hill would curse them.”

“Curse them?” Hux felt the heat rise in his face. His fingers curled into tight fists at his sides. “Where are they?”

Mitaka led Hux out into the courtyard. The gardener, under gardener, and about a dozen laborers were gathered there, their saws and axes and other tools laid on the stones at their feet.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Hux demanded. “I’ve been told you have refused to obey my order to clear that hill.”

“Forgive me, my lord.” The gardener stepped forward. He was a lanky, middle-aged man named Kaplan, with a careworn face and sad eyes. “But, seeing as you weren’t raised in these parts, you might not know--"

“Know what?” Hux demanded, cutting the man’s words short and glaring. “On what subject would you presume to educate me?”

“Those-- those trees, my lord,” the gardener stammered, flushing under Hux’s scrutiny. “They’re sacred, sir.”

“Sacred?” Hux laughed. “Sacred to whom?”

“To them, sir.” The gardener nodded significantly, as if Hux should already know the answer, as if the word should not need to be spoken aloud. Then Hux realized that the man was indicating a direction with that inclination of his head: _down, below, beneath_. “To them, sir,” he repeated, “them that owns that hill.”

Hux sneered at the man, his lips pursing tightly. “I own that hill!” he snapped. “As I own every rock and tree and blade of grass around this house! As I own every one of you!”

There was some quiet grumbling among the laborers at this and one of them, a young blonde-haired man who had been introduced to Hux the evening before as Thanisson, stepped forward, taking off his cap and wringing it nervously between dirt-stained hands. “Pardon me, my lord, but that’s what folk around here believe. It’s what your own uncle believed. He knew about them. And he respected them.”

“Them! Them who? Do tell me, please!” Hux cried. “I am all eagerness to acquaint myself with these mysterious people who have usurped a part of my property, or have deluded the ignorant tenants here into thinking that they have done so.”

A murmur ran through the crowd of men; one old yeoman at the back made the sign of the Cross. “Don’t say that, my lord,” the gardener whispered, glancing around. “The hidden people hear all such things. Especially what’s said in anger.”

The Hidden People. Hux remembered the evening before: the weird painting in the dining room, the halting, hesitant words of the footman. He had used the same phrase: the Hidden People. And another name, too.

Rolling his eyes, Hux said: “You mean the Sith?”

The hisses of indrawn breath, of shock, that came from the gathered men were so predictably melodramatic that Hux almost laughed.

“Please my lord!” Thanisson cried. “Don’t call them by their true name! It offends them!”

“I don’t give a damn what offends a collective delusion of ignorant people,” Hux replied, his tone quiet and icy, each word clipped. “I do, however, care about what offends me, and God knows that all of you should as well! You have ten minutes to gather your tools and begin your work or you shall all of you find yourselves in search of new employment by dawn, not to mention new homes for yourselves and your families.”

The young man gave a helpless little squeak and tried once more to persuade his new master. “But, my lord — if we cut down their sacred trees, on their own hill— we’ll be cursed for sure--"

“If you don’t do it, I’ll ruin you!” Hux snarled, stepping closer to the laborer, holding the young man’s gaze with his cold green eyes. “And not just you, but your wife if you have one, and your brats, and your infirm old mother. How would you like to see them all turned out on the road before morning, hauling all they own on their backs without the prospect of a warm hearth or a roof to walk towards? Does that seem to you like a curse? Because I can guarantee that it is one I can make happen.”

Thanisson swallowed audibly but made no reply. Kaplan gestured to the other men and, resignedly, they stooped to retrieve their tools. Hux watched them file out of the courtyard and down the path that led across the lawn to the park and the distant hill. When the last man had passed out of earshot, he turned to Mitaka. “Follow them. Make sure they set to their work and don’t find some excuse to delay it.” Then he went inside, back to the library, and closed the door at his back.

Leaning against the heavy panel of oak, breathing deeply, Hux was irritated to feel the trembling in his hands, the roiling uneasiness in the pit of his stomach. _No_ , he hissed to himself, shaking his head. _I won’t listen. It isn’t true_.

But the memory of the voice came echoing through his skull, as it always did in such moments.

“You will never be the man your father was.” The words fell like daggers, sharp and infinitely cold from her wrinkled lips. “You are weak. People will never respect you, as they respected your father. Never obey you, as they obeyed your father. You are but a pale imitation of a great man who accomplished great things. Think of all that he built. All of the men he commanded. You will never be anything at all.”

Hux dug his fingers into his temples, gritted his teeth, trying to make it stop, trying to silence his mother’s cruel, reedy voice. “You are dead, woman,” he muttered. “You have no power over me now.”

But he had told himself that before. Over and over again he had tried to exorcise her, and fill with his own pleasures and pursuits her lifelong aloofness, more painful by far than the meanness of her words. He loathed her for it, her power to reach out from the grave to shame him. He loathed her ability to hold up a mirror and show him what he thought of himself.


	3. Anxious In Its Sleep

The laborers, once they had been persuaded to work by fear of losing their livelihoods, proved efficient enough, clearing a dozen trees from the crown of the hill on the first day. But this hardly made a dint in the wild little woodland, and so Hux ordered them out again early the next morning. By late in the afternoon they had felled a dozen more and, sending Mitaka out to oversee their continued obedience, Hux felt sufficiently confident of their progress to attend to other business. He shut himself in his uncle’s study, going over columns of figures in the estate’s ledger books and making a list of servants to dismiss as soon as replacements could be obtained.

After supper he returned to the study and had just sat down to read a London newspaper that had come by post that afternoon, when there was a knock at the door and Mitaka, with his customary timidity, peered nervously into the room. 

“My lord, there is someone here who wishes to speak with you.”

Hux glanced up from the newspaper with a look of irritation. “It’s a bit late in the day for visitors, is it not?”

“So I told her, my lord, but she refused to leave until she’d had a word with you.”

“She?”

“Yes sir. She calls herself Phasma, sir.”

“Phasma?” Hux curled a lip at this. “What a ridiculous name. A village woman, come to beg for a position in the kitchens for herself or one of her brats, I suppose?”

“I do not know, my lord. She would not state her business.”

Hux’s curiosity was piqued despite himself. “Oh, very well. Let her in.”

Hux wasn’t really interested enough in the woman to have formed any real expectation of what she might look like. But if he had, it certainly would not have resembled the Amazonian creature who strode with perfect confidence into the study. She was dressed in an odd assemblage of clothing: a long skirt, pinned up on one side to reveal a pair of men’s trousers tucked into leather riding boots; a patchwork pinafore atop a white lace petticoat, and over it all a black cloak with a voluminous hood which hid her visage in shadows. Soon enough, however, she lifted her hands - clad in loosely knitted, fingerless gloves – and pulled the hood back, revealing blonde hair cut short, and a pale, lovely face set with delicate lips and a pair of pitiless blue eyes. Hux swallowed his surprise and feigned perfect indifference, not bothering to stand as basic courtesy would dictate.

“I’m sure you’ll excuse me if I don’t rise, Ms… _Phasma_ ,” he drawled, making no effort at politeness. “I am a very busy man, so the quicker you tell me your business here, the sooner I will be able to return to mine.”

For several moments the woman did not speak: she simply stood staring at Hux with a hard, relentless gaze. Hux was on the verge of demanding that she talk or leave when she finally opened her mouth.

“You are a fool.”

Hux started in his chair. “I beg your pardon?”

“I wasn’t sure which it was, whether you were merely ignorant or arrogant. I wanted to come, to judge for myself, and now that I have I see that you are both: an arrogant fool. I pity you for it.”

Rage boiling in his veins, pushing heat to burn openly in his cheeks, Hux jumped to his feet. “How dare you come into my house and insult me--"

“You have made a very grave mistake.” She cut across his words, speaking in a slow, deep, regal tone. “He knows of it. Knows what you’ve done. The hill, the trees… He feels it, you see, in the marrow of his bones, in his flesh. They are a part of him, as he is a part of them. You might have been allowed to live here in peace and prosperity on his lands. But now you will suffer for your disobedience. Your disrespect.”

“I don’t know what you’re playing at,” Hux snarled, leaning forward against his desk and practically spitting at the woman in his fury. “I don’t know whether you are mad, or speak on behalf of someone who is, but these lands are mine - mine and mine alone - and there is no one who has the right to come into this house and dictate to me how I live or what I do with my property!”

The woman smiled as if she found this greatly amusing. “Your property. If the earth and the trees and the water and the stars that hang above them can be said to belong to anyone, they belong to him. These are his domains. He knows every stone and every spring, and the powers that reside in them bow and bend to his command. You are of no more consequence here than a dry leaf, and just as easily blown away.”

Hux was so livid he could form no coherent response. Instead he balled his fists and cried for Mitaka, who practically fell into the room, eyes boggling.

“Throw this creature out!” Hux cried. “And make sure she is never admitted again!”

The woman calmly raised her hands and drew the hood of her cloak back over her head. “You have one last chance to save yourself,” she intoned. “Leave this house tonight and never return, and no harm will pursue you. But touch another sacred tree, or do any other harm to hill or hedge, and you will be made to repent of it.”

“Get out,” Hux growled, barely able to restrain himself from picking up one of his uncle’s paperweights and hurling it at the woman’s head. “And understand this: I will never leave this house, and there is no earthly power than can drive me to do so!”

Phasma nodded. “Just as you say.” She turned then and strode past Mitaka. “I will show myself out.”

Mitaka looked wildly from Hux to the departing woman, unsure if he should go or stay. He had just made up his mind to pursue the woman when Hux shouted his name as loudly as if he had been standing in some distant part of the house. Mitaka jumped several inches.

“Yes my lord?”

“Go and rouse the workmen. Tell them I want every single tree on that hill struck down, and I want it done now. Tonight. Tell them I shall double their wages if they work through the night to accomplish it.”

“Yes, my lord.”

It was not more than fifteen minutes - fifteen minutes during which Hux paced in a haze of fury, grinding the heels of his boots into the rug and cursing the strange woman - when Mitaka returned, sidling sideways into the room. Hux said nothing, merely fixed with him with a blazing stare.

“The workmen refused, sir,” he stammered as quietly as possible. “They said they will be back at work first thing in the morning, but that you could triple their wages and still they would refuse. That no inducement in the world could persuade them to cut down the trees on that hill in the darkness.”

Hux simmered. He internalized his feelings, transforming his anger into a sharp throbbing beneath his temples, a building pressure in his lungs. Somewhere at the back of his mind his mother’s voice began whispering familiar words: disobedience, weakness, failure. Flashing a look of utter loathing at Mitaka, as if the whole sorry business were his fault, he strode from the room.

“Sir? My lord? Where are you going?”

“To do the work myself!”


	4. The Solemn Eyed

Hux had never cut down a tree, never split a log or thrust a saw blade into a piece of wood, in his life, but this didn’t stop him. Throwing on his greatcoat he went to the stables, fetched an axe, then made his way toward the hill, carrying in his free hand a lantern he had seized from a terrified stable boy. The light bobbed over the grass, wet from an afternoon drizzle, its beam of light casting a massive shadow from the hill as Hux approached it. The night was clear, the air cold, but Hux had not struck the trunk of the nearest ash tree more than ten or fifteen times before he began to sweat and discarded his coat and waistcoat on the ground.

It was hard work. He hated to admit it, but it was true. His arms soon began to ache with the effort of hefting the axe, of swinging it forward with any sort of precision, and Hux cursed his own folly in not bringing with him a canteen. His mouth was parched. He had not yet cut halfway through the bole before he had to stop to rest, laying the axe down and wiping perspiration from his brow with the cuff of his rolled-up sleeve. He glanced up at the stars, shining with remarkable clarity above him, and as he traced the Little Dipper with the tip of a finger he heard it:

The sound of flowing water.

It was close by, on the crown of the hill, in the thick of the trees. There was a spring somewhere in there, its waters bubbling up and trickling over the lip of a rock, falling - by the sound of it - into a little pool. Desperately thirsty, Hux fetched up his lantern and ventured between the trees, his boots sinking into the tangled undergrowth. It was perfectly still in the midst of the little woodland, without a breeze stirring, without so much as the whisper of a trembling leaf to lead him away from the sound of the water, and he went no more than a dozen yards before he came upon it: a perfectly round pool, so clear you could see the bottom of the shallow depression into which the water flowed. Hux laughed with sheer delight and fell to his knees, cupping his hands and reaching into the water to fill them: he took one drink, then another, then thrust his hands into the pool a third time.

When he raised his hands again there was another hand - a bone-white hand - gripping his wrist.

Hux cried out and fell backwards into the undergrowth. When he dared to look back at the pool it appeared just as it had when he’d first approached it: clear as glass, placid, the waters of the spring trickling down between moss-covered rocks. He could still see the bottom of the pool, soft grasses pressed flat by the weight of the water atop them. There was nothing, no one there.

But he had felt it, as certain as he felt his heart now pounding wildly against his breastbone, as he felt the blood rushing hot past his ears. Scrambling to his feet, Hux turned and fled, back to the cleared patch at the verge of the woods, lantern light swinging in wild arcs with the haste of his movements.

Back there in the open, in the cool night air with the expanse of stars above him, Hux took hold of his common sense, forced his fears back down. He was tired, fatigued by physical labor he was unused to performing. The spring had appeared clear in the darkness, but that had no doubt been an optical illusion and what he had thought was the bottom was not: the true bottom was probably choked with clinging weeds and broken branches that could grab and grip a hand or foot. It was all in his imagination. It was not real.

His axe lay in the grass where he had left it, the bite it had taken in the trunk of the ash gaped just as wide as when he had gone in search of a drink. But as Hux stood, reeling slightly upon his feet from the shock, he realized that something else around him had changed. Something was different. He went very still for a moment, barely breathing, straining with every sense to perceive the change that he could feel in his skin, in an itching at the back of his consciousness. What was it? What had altered?

Light. The full moon was past its zenith, and its glow was now obscured by fresh scudding clouds. But there was light now, illuminating the boles of the trees, the pale undersides of the leaves hanging still over Hux’s head: a pale, white light that did not seem to fall from the sky, but to rise up, as if from beneath the soil.

Looking out from the top of the hill, Hux suddenly observed a solid oblong of light falling out over the grass from the base of the slope beneath him. Bewildered, his curiosity so sharp that it overcame the fear welling in his gut, Hux scrabbled down the hillside, almost slipping on the rain-wet grass in his haste. When he reached the front of the hill what he beheld nearly buckled his knees.

At the base of the hill a doorway had appeared, a square filled with light, a whitish vapor like steam roiling out around the edges and rising to crystallize on the cold night air. High enough to admit a tall man, the doorway seemed to have been formed by the rectangle of earth that had fallen in one whole piece forward onto the grass, forming a kind of ramp. But Hux could not see what lay beyond the opening, for the light that spilled through it was too bright for his eyes to penetrate. Nonetheless he felt himself drawn towards it, inexorably attracted, desperately eager to pass beneath the earthen lintel and discover the source of the unearthly light. He stood staring at it, his logical mind disbelieving his eyes while a wild, primal fear grasped at his heart and limbs and urged him to run away as fast as his legs could carry him. Yet he still could not persuade himself not to draw nearer. As he did, Hux began to hear something, a faint something, like a vibration of the light itself, barely tickling against his eardrums. It drew him on, closer to the doorway, to the light, and he strained to distinguish the nature of the sound until it took a definitive form:

Voices. A voice. A familiar voice he heard often enough, berating him from inside the chambers of his mind.

“Mother?” Hux whispered.

But now her voice was coming from outside of him, from the light in the doorway. And though still perfectly recognizable, her tone was warmer and her words had changed:

“Forgive me, my son. My darling son. You have surpassed all my expectations. There is not a man in the realm more powerful than you: no, not even the king. All of your father’s accomplishments are as nothing: you are the most glorious of our line.”

Hux shook his head, but the voice grew clearer, stronger, the words and the warmth of his dead mother’s voice pulling him - step by step - closer to the door. 

“I am so very proud of you, my son. My strong son. My fearless son. The power you hold over other men. Such power!”

He knew she was dead, knew she had breathed her last over a year before, knew - in his mind and in the cankerous pit of his heart - that she would never have uttered such words. But he reached out to her, with mind and word and hand. “Mother?” he whispered again, and his fingertips passed the threshold of the doorway, into the light.

“Closer, my son. Come. Closer.”

He stepped through the door, blinded by the white light, completely immersed in its brightness. Then--

Blackness. Silence. The light vanished, his mother’s voice was gone, and Hux stood in complete, all-encompassing darkness. Instantly his curiosity vanished, replaced by cold terror, and he turned: seeing nothing, unable to judge how far he had turned, whether to one side or all the way around to face the way he had entered. The doorway was gone, closed, and when he threw himself bodily forward he collided - not with the soft, wet earth - but with the hard smoothness of stone.

Suddenly there was illumination again, behind him, and he turned to see, stretching out before him, a corridor dimly lit around the edges by a pale, flickering blue light. The corridor was oddly shaped, like an upside-down triangle - narrow at the floor and broadening out at the ceiling - and it sloped steeply downwards, deeper into the earth. The light outlining its floor and walls was like a running fire, an unnatural, rippling, ghostly flame, giving off no heat. With no where else to go, and a solid wall of stone at his back, Hux stumbled along the corridor, his legs almost propelling him forward against his will, the slope of the floor hastening his descent. Although the corridor had appeared to be straight from the vicinity of the doorway, plunging down in a direct line, Hux now found that it was spiraling downward, curving, growing steeper with each step. Suddenly he lost his footing and began to slide downwards, the floor of the corridor beneath him as slick as a winter pond. Hux twisted and clawed at the sloping floor until he could feel several of his fingernails rip partially away from his flesh, but nothing he did slowed his forward motion. The blue flames abruptly gave way to total blackness and Hux felt himself continue to descend until the floor beneath him suddenly evened out and he stopped.

For a moment he lay still, aware of cold stone beneath him, damp air passing like a draft against his skin. He could see nothing, hear nothing, but somehow - in his nerve endings, perhaps, or in the shafts of hair that stood erect on his neck - he knew that he was no longer alone. Gazing in terror at the blackness around him, Hux began to perceive almost imperceptible pulses of light, appearing in different places around him before fading quickly back into darkness. As he turned his head quickly from side to side, waiting for each fresh appearance of the subtle light, he noticed that they seemed to be growing larger - or coming nearer to where he lay.

All at once the myriad patches of light - palest blue, fainter than the fire that had run along the corridor - began to glow in unison: hundreds of them, in a circle around him, and beneath them--

 _Faces_. But not faces. Faces Hux had only ever seen before as brushstrokes of paint on a dark, dusty canvas. Not human, not animal. Hard, severe faces, whiter than the belly of the moon, with unusually large, squarish eyes: black eyes, devoid of reflection, of depth, of life. The mouths of the creatures were mere lines, long and fixed; their bodies, like their faces, were white, the contours of joints highlighted with thick black veins. Hairless, genderless, the beings - and there must have been a hundred of them, ringed around Hux’s prostrate form, staring down at him from every angle - did not make a sound. Nor did Hux. The terror that constricted his throat kept down the scream that ached to explode from his lungs.

With a single movement - as if coordinated by some central, external brain - several of the creatures stooped and grasped Hux, hauling him upright to stand on feet he could no longer feel, legs he could no longer control. His mouth opened on a silent scream, and his instinct to struggle was smothered by a heaviness that left him with no illusions about his ability to escape. The creatures half-dragged, half-walked him forward, crowding close around him and still staring with those empty eyes, and their bodies - though appearing hard from a distance - felt clammy and yielding where they collided with Hux’s own. He was steered into another, larger corridor with a high, vaulted ceiling: its walls and floor were made of polished black stone, like obsidian, illuminated by strange, amorphous red globes that floated and danced overhead. 

_I am hallucinating again_ , Hux told himself, his inner voice ringing frantic and false in his head. _This cannot be real_.

The corridor opened out suddenly and the creatures that held Hux threw him forward to fall hard upon his knees. Looming up before him was a towering figure clad in the highly burnished armor of a medieval knight, a black cloak falling from their shoulder. Their helmet was in shape like the faces of the white creatures: delineated by the same harsh black lines, gazing with the same dull, fathomless eyes. As Hux watched, the knight raised its gauntlet-clad hands and lifted the helmet from its head.

“You!” Hux gasped.

Phasma, the same woman who had paid him an unwelcome visit just hours before, gazed down at him, her expression hard and pitiless. “I did warn you,” she said coolly. “I gave you the chance to repent of your actions. But you persisted in your folly and now — he is very angry.” She stooped and put a metal-coated finger beneath Hux’s chin, raising his head to force him to meet her gaze. “Are you frightened now, you fool?”

Under normal circumstances Hux would have spat in her face to be thus addressed, but he found that fear had left him no saliva. “I fear no one,” he insisted, the slight tremor in his voice calling his words into question. Phasma tilted her head thoughtfully to one side.

“We shall see.” Straightening, she nodded to the creatures holding him. They hauled Hux to his feet again and propelled him forward.

Despite his fear and anger, Hux could not help but stare in awe at the room he found himself in. It was like the nave of some infernal cathedral: floor and walls of polished obsidian, a ceiling so lofty it was lost in the darkness high above. The walls of the long, narrow room were honeycombed as far up as Hux could see with open niches in which the white creatures clustered, leering down at him as he was steered along by his captors. The eerie red of the lights, which here hovered along the onyx pillars that lined the central aisle and floated randomly in the air high above, reflected in the black eyes of the creatures, looking for all the world as if a thousand red-eyed demons had gathered in a towering amphitheater to--

 _To what_ , Hux wondered? _To what am I being led_?

To a raised dais at the end of the room, it seemed. It was set within an alcove as high as the invisible roof above, in which hung a tapestry that must have stretched a mile in length had it been unrolled over open ground. In the center of the tapestry was woven a massive white circle set within an octagon, the lines of the octagon meeting in intricate knots, stark against the black backdrop. At the foot of the tapestry was a chair, a throne of the same polished black stone as formed the floor and walls.

And on the chair sat a man.

Was it a man? Hux could not be certain, though the breadth of the chest, the not-insignificant muscles that undulated beneath its garments, certainly suggested so. The being possessed a long, lean body, clad all in black, and it sat in a lazy, lounging attitude, with one leg thrown carelessly over the arm of the chair. It wore a mask or a helmet, this one having little resemblance to the staring faces of the white creatures except for the eyes, which were fathomless and black, blending almost seamlessly into the surrounding face. Around the hidden eyes were lines of silver knot work, weaving and crossing in intricate patterns, and where the mouth should have been there was nothing but a black panel. It gave the being an immensely forbidding aspect, this absence of mouth, as if whatever lay beneath the helmet was so powerful that it needed to be silenced, muzzled, contained.

But there was a difference in this figure, a difference from Phasma and from the clone-like white creatures that stared and hovered and gazed down upon him from every niche in the towering walls. Power, confidence, and a regal kind of boredom radiated from this being. And something else-- Something Hux could not quite identify but which he could feel, stabbing through him, slicing too familiarly against something similar inside himself. Hux could sense the being’s gaze upon him, an intensity of energy directed at him that he could almost feel rippling and burning through the air, and he winced as if he had been struck. But at the same time he was unable to look away.

Hux was led to a place a dozen or so feet from the dais, then pushed down to his knees like a supplicant forced to genuflect before a foreign king. The black-clad figure sat motionless for a moment, then drew in the long leg that was draped over the arm of the chair and rose to his feet. He walked down the steps of the dais and approached Hux, his black cloak cascading over his broad shoulders, pooling and uncoiling against the polished floor as he moved. The being’s garments were composed of some tight-fitting, slightly iridescent material that slid against his flesh as he walked; his supple boots reached above his knees. The way he carried his body reminded Hux of the stride of a panther he had once seen at the zoological gardens, and when he stopped, stooping slightly over Hux and tilting his masked head to one side, his stillness and silence were absolute. And unnerving.

“So pale.” 

The being’s voice was deep and, beneath the mask, weirdly distant, like sound traveling through water. Hux tried but failed to suppress a shiver; he continued to stare into the mask, transfixed, the hanging red lights casting lines of scarlet fire along the silver knot work around the figure's eyes. He noticed the difference between the eyes of the white creatures and those of the being bending over him: the creatures’ eyes reflected light like dead stone, bouncing it back, while these eyes absorbed light, sucking it in and swallowing it, transfiguring it into nothingness.

The being lifted a gloved hand and extended a long finger to brush against Hux’s hair. “So bright,” it murmured slowly, almost imperceptibly, “like the sun.”

Then, abruptly, the figure straightened and put his hands to the mask. Hux’s breath caught painfully in his lungs as he awaited, fearfully, the revelation of the being’s true face.

Pale skin, and a mass of black hair that captured the light of the red orbs in its sheen. Hux’s surprised exhalation left his lips with an audible gasp. Despite his terror, his anger, he could not look away from the visage before him, certain that he had never seen anything so strangely beautiful in all his life. The being was indeed a man: a young man, and yet in his dark eyes, in the long, sharp angles of his bones, there was an agelessness - almost an ancientness - etched by knowledge and pain. Pleasure and cruelty were combined in his plump, soft lips, contrasting with eyes that expressed only sorrow.

“Why did you cut down our sacred trees?” the man asked, glancing at Hux, then looking up to gaze around the walls of the room as if the captive at his feet was no more than an afterthought. His voice was deep, smooth, but human, losing with the removal of the mask its remote, otherworldly quality. “You had been warned…”

“My lands,” Hux growled, and he managed somehow to keep his voice steady. “My trees. I may dispose of them however I choose.”

“Your uncle understood. He respected our ways, our prohibitions--"

“My uncle was a doddering old fool who at the end of his life couldn’t tell the difference between his chamber pot and his soup bowl.”

Now the man looked back at him, and his dark eyes - almost black in the dimly lit room - pierced into Hux’s like blades of ice. Hux, to his great shame, could not endure the intensity of that stare: he let his head fall. 

“You have no respect for your elders,” the man said softly, squatting down to try and catch Hux’s gaze. There was something about the softness of his tone that was more terrifying than a scream. “Even now, here, you are surrounded by your elders, by those who have existed much longer than you. Some by mere years, others-- by hundreds. Thousands. You’re like a child: ignorant and willful, stumbling through the woods without direction. But don’t worry. We’ll teach you. We’ll make certain you learn as you should.”

He rose to his full height again, towering over Hux where he knelt on the floor. “I am called Kylo Ren, and I am the king of these people: the Sith. An ancient people, older than these hills you call your own, older than the trees. Everything here belongs to them, all that you claim: the woods, the meadows, the very stones of which your grand house is constructed. It belonged to them before your uncle came here, before the first of your line was anything more than a mote of dust in a storm. The waters of every stream that cross this land flows in their veins; the sinews of every tree are their bones. For they are this land, you see: they are a part of it, and in disrespecting it you have disrespected them. You have disrespected me.” He stared hard at Hux and Hux returned his gaze; though it seemed to burn the tissue behind his eyes, he could not avert them. “How different it might have been, had you humbled yourself just enough to honor what is ours. If you had left us alone we would, in turn, have left you alone, to live your life as you wished. We would have blessed and protected you, aided you as our honored vassal.”

At this a rush of hot anger flooded through Hux, overcoming all his caution. “I am no one’s vassal!” he spat, glaring up at Ren. “I am Brendol Hux the Second, Lord of Arkanis--"

A sound rose from the walls, from the gathered white creatures: the first sound Hux had heard from them, a kind of hiss like steam being released from a machine, and he found that Ren was staring at him with surprise. “You offer your true name to me freely?” he asked.

Hux’s voice failed. He gaped, stammered in confusion. “What? What do you mean?”

Behind him, Phasma laughed: a short, humorless bark. “A person’s true name is a gift,” Ren explained. “It gives the person to whom you bestow it power to command you.”

Hux sneered. “I am not your vassal. I shall never be brought to heel like some dog!”

To Hux’s astonishment this outburst was met with a smirk. Kylo Ren’s dark eyes glittered in the glow of the hovering lights. “We’ll see.” Ren strode slowly a few paces away from Hux then, turning, gestured upwards with one hand. To Hux’s astonishment he scrambled instantly to his feet, though he had no conscious intention to do so. 

“We have music in these halls, of a kind,” Ren said, joining his hands behind him like a member of Parliament addressing his colleagues, his expression sober and thoughtful. “Perhaps you’ve heard it already, in the night. But there are some sounds we are not given to hear, some noises that, from our nature, from our habits, we cannot enjoy. The crowing of the cock at dawn, for example.”

And Ren waved one hand and Hux - instantly and unintentionally - opened his mouth and gave a loud imitation of a rooster’s morning call: _ca-ca-caoooooooooooooo_! The sound reverberated between the soaring stone walls and the white creatures began to laugh: if laughter was indeed what they were doing. The sound was uncanny: a cold, metallic clicking multiplied by the hundreds, the thousands, like insects or the gears of a massive machine grinding in whirring unison. Hux clapped his hands over his mouth and the call of the rooster faded away.

Ren was grinning. He swept his hand down and Hux fell back to his knees. “That was but a mild taste of what you can be made to do. Now that I have your true name.”

He strode back to where Hux cowered and knelt suddenly, putting himself on the same level, drawing so close that the tip of his long nose almost brushed against Hux’s cheek. “My people are very angry,” he murmured, his voice something between a whisper and a purr, and one eyebrow arched as he looked up, directing Hux’s gaze to the white forms crowded into the hive-like niches, innumerable as stars. “Fortunately I am more forgiving. I am willing to give you another chance to consider your actions, to be more--" He paused, feigning to search for the right word. "--accommodating of your neighbors.” When Hux opened his mouth to protest Ren pressed a long, leather-clad finger to his lips, closing them instantly. 

More than closing them. To his horror, Hux felt his lips melt together, as if his mouth were a gaping wound that, in one instant, Ren had stitched closed and caused to heal over. Panicking, Hux tried to pry his lips open again: a scream rose from his gorge, his throat pushed to expel it - but to no use. The tip of his tongue quested for his lips and felt nothing but a wall of smooth skin.

“You see, it’s within our power to make life very uncomfortable for you,” Ren continued, ignoring the choked noises Hux was making, the wild darting of his wide, terrified eyes. He reached up and stroked Hux’s hair instead, passing ginger strands between his fingers with infinite gentleness. “We can make it so that you are never able to sleep peacefully again. So that you are beset with strange dreams, falling down through endless darkness, never reaching the bottom; running from a beast you can feel but never see. We can make it so you hear our voices in your head, see our forms passing like shadows all around you, until madness is the only refuge you can find. Or we can take you apart, piece by piece - in payment of the debt you owe us.” Ren brought his gloved fingers down from Hux’s scalp to his cheek. “Shall I extract such a payment from you now? A tithe? Only a small something--"

Hux felt a dull pressure in his left eye as Ren passed his fingers a fraction from the eyelid. Then — a heaviness, as if suddenly his eye were made of solid stone.

For, indeed, it was. Hux still could not scream, but he did so internally when Ren lifted his hand and showed him the eyeball rolling and twitching upon his gloved palm, an eyeball made of dull grey stone.

It was Hux’s eyeball, there was no doubt of that, for Hux’s vision had suddenly split in two. With his right eye he could still see Ren’s face, his full lips pulled tight in a smirk; but with his left eye – the one sitting on Ren’s palm - he saw his own face: white with horror, lips visible from the outside but pressed together in an immobile grimace, and behind him the ghastly, gaping faces of the white creatures, rank upon rank of them, observing his torment. Hux raised his hand to the empty eye socket, feeling with trembling fingers what his missing left eye could see. The odd part of it all was that he had felt no pain in the extraction, felt no pain then, only the phantom heaviness of his stone eyeball in Ren’s hand.

“Do you see?” Ren asked, then clicked his tongue in reproof of himself. “Forgive me. That was a poor choice of words. Do you understand? Piece by piece you may be brought to us, piece by piece reassembled in this very hall: living, conscious, immortal but immovable.” Ren gazed around the lofty room, the beehive niches of white creatures reaching up into the shadows pierced by the floating orbs of light. “You will make a fine ornament to my throne room. A lord. A peer of the realm. We have a miller, a merchant, a sea captain. A hedge witch who thought she could steal from us. But no one of such rank as you. There was a king once, but that was long, long ago and he has long since crumbled into dust--"

“STOP!!!!”

It took a moment for Hux to realize that the person who had screamed this, in a voice raw with rage and terror, was him. His mouth had opened again and all that he had been holding inside had spilled out in that one anguished cry.

Ren nodded. He curled his fingers around the stone eyeball, passed the gloved fist a fraction of an inch from Hux’s face, and Hux’s eye was returned to its socket: a wet, soft, almost weightless eye, revolving in its proper place, passing in union with its partner over Ren’s arrogant face.

“Just as I said,” Ren murmured. “You begin to learn.”

Rising to his full height, Ren jerked his head in Phasma’s direction and Hux found himself being once more hauled roughly to his feet. “The choice is yours, Lord Hux,” Ren said, placing an emphasis on the title as he walked slowly, carelessly, back to the dais, to the black obsidian throne of his kingship. “Make sure you don’t require another lesson.”

Several of the white creatures seized Hux by his arms and, with Phasma leading the way, he was pushed back down the corridor. He twisted in their grasp once, looking back at the long figure that had draped itself again over the throne. Ren was drawing the silver-ribbed mask back over his flashing black eyes, over his supple mouth; hiding away the pale, narrow face that was - in its youth, in its strange beauty - too vulnerable, too human. Watching it disappear, Hux felt something like a pang of regret.

He barely noticed the corridors through which he was steered until they came to one lined on both sides with alcoves. And in each alcove was set a stone statue. A woman in peasant’s rags, a man in the elegant court dress of a century before. A cleric in his ecclesiastical robes, a woman wearing the wimple of a medieval noblewoman, a Saxon warrior in furs and homespun, with a stone sword in his fixed stone hands. All of them silent, still - yet Hux was not deceived. As he was marched past them he saw their eyes fix upon his face and follow, turning in stone sockets with a soft grinding sound. How many years, how many ages had they stood thus, captive, a punishment for some transgression, awaiting the next to join their voiceless ranks? A violent shiver ran through Hux’s body and he fixed his gaze on Phasma’s shining armor as she strode ahead of him, not wanting to see those conscious eyes moving, not wanting to fathom the inexpressible thoughts behind them.

Soon they reached the end of the corridor. It was not a wall or a door, but a curtain of shimmering light, undulating softly like some kind of liquid suspended between stone arches. Phasma passed through the substance without pausing and Hux was pushed forward at her heels by the white creatures who held him. He felt a tingling sensation, a moment of warmth that seemed to seep into his bones and dissolve their marrow: then, suddenly, fresh, cold air. 

He stood upon the crown of the hill, the slope before him littered with felled trees, the towering oaks and ash still standing behind him sighing in a chill breeze that presaged the coming dawn. Hux turned a full circle. Phasma stood beside him, no longer clad in armor but in the motley garments she had been dressed in for her visit, and the white creatures were nowhere to be seen. The earth of the hill was solid behind him: grass and nettles and tangled foliage. No gaping doors of watery light, no long descending corridors lined with blue flames.

“This is where I leave you,” Phasma said, pulling the hood of her cloak up over her short blonde hair. Hux stared at her.

“You are not one of them,” he stated, curiously. He was not sure himself if it were a simple recitation of fact or a question. “Those white creatures.”

“No. I am human, like you.”

“Then why--"

“I was a child when I first saw them. I had gone into the woods to gather berries and I came upon them, standing in a circle in a glade. I didn’t fear them,” she mused quietly. “I wanted to be one of them. They made the fallen leaves dance in the air for me. They made flowers bloom upon the cold autumn ground. I could speak with them, you see, inside my head. It was a gift, passed down from my mother, and her mother before her.”

“Gift?” Hux repeated. “Sounds more like a curse.”

“So you would think. Fool.” She regarded him coolly. “Have you never wished to be something more than you are? Have you never wished to understand more than you, as a mortal doomed to age and die, are given to know? It was five hundred autumns ago when I went into the woods as a child to pick berries. I have never regretted my choice. Will you regret yours, I wonder?”

Hux made no answer, nor was he given a chance to. “This is where I leave you,” Phasma said again, and she passed a hand quickly before Hux’s face. Darkness and insensibility took him instantly.

When he opened his eyes again it was dawn, the sun just beginning to climb in a pale pink-grey sky. For a moment Hux could only think of a queer dream that had passed, so real that the horror of it clung to him like the sweat from a fever. But as he sat up, his hands pushed backwards into dew-damp grass and he found that he was laying on the slope of the hill in his shirtsleeves, breeches, and boots, chilled to the bone.

He got to his feet, fumbled around for a few moments searching for his abandoned coat, then picked it up with trembling hands. The memories of the night replayed themselves in both his mind and his flesh, horror and awe mingling in ripples that rolled over him like lightning bolts. The pool of water and the grasping hand; the door of light and the white creatures; Phasma and the stone statues.

The tall, regal form of Kylo Ren.

Stubbornness was a trait of the Hux line, and the present lord of Arkanis Manor possessed no little of the dubious quality. He did not want the Sith to be real, did not want the vast chamber beneath the hill and the haughty, solemn-eyed king to be real, and so he refused to believe that the events of the night had really happened, as if this refusal was enough in itself to negate their existence. As he made his way down the slope a wave of nausea hit him and he bent and vomited in the grass, his head dizzy, his skin prickling with the cold clamminess of a coming fever. Following the winding path that led to the house, his legs sluggish beneath him, Hux latched onto the memory of the pool of water and he determined – through sheer force of will – that he had been poisoned by it, that every incident of the night had been conjured by his imagination. The white creatures, the floating balls of vaporous light, his stone eyeball and the gallery of imprisoned people, souls caught in statues like flies in drops of amber: all of it mere products of exhaustion, irritation, and some microscopic foulness in the water he had drank.

Most of all, he consigned Kylo Ren to his imagination, to the weirdness of a confused, half-remembered dream where such a thing of unearthly beauty and coldness and sorrow could dwell without troubling him.

A group of servants were gathered in a semi-circle on the gravel drive at the front of house, Mitaka among them, and when Hux staggered into view the nervous little man gave a cry and ran to meet him.

“My lord! My lord, what-- Where have you been? I went to wake you and you were not in your bed. We searched the house and you were no where to be found--"

Mitaka’s eyes grew wide as he stared at Hux, taking in - no doubt - the state of his clothing, the grass and soil that clung to his garments and hair, the pallor of his skin that was a shade lighter and more bluish than was usual even for Hux. He was shivering, too - violently - but he glared at Mitaka as if he could not understand the reason for his concern.

“I was on the hill, doing the workmen’s duty,” he spat in answer. “I drank some water out of a spring in the woods – it must have been bad. I lay down to rest and must have fallen asleep. No matter. It is dawn now.”

Hux turned and looked back at the hill in the distance, its crown of trees hung with ribbons of morning mist. He was no one’s vassal and he would bow to no threats. Certainly not to threats made by fictions of a fevered brain.

“My lord?” Mitaka said, drawing his attention.

“Gather the workmen, Mitaka,” Hux ordered. “Now that it’s daylight they should have recovered their nerves. I want more of those trees taken down. I want to see the bald pate of that hill before the end of the week, and I’ll brook no refusals. Do you understand me? I want every single one of those damned trees cut down!”

And having delivered his commandment, Hux turned and went inside.


	5. To the Water and the Wild

Hux spent most of the rest of that day in his bed, fighting off an affliction that seemed to have no fixed nature and vague, uncertain symptoms. He was beset by chills and a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, and he passed in and out of a sort of delirium, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake but pinned in place by unpleasant thoughts. In a few of his more lucid moments, Hux acknowledged to himself that the “illness” was his own invention, a physical manifestation to cover up a much more simple complaint: fear. But that did not fit neatly with the picture of reality he had painted for himself. What was there to fear from phantoms conjured up by bad water?

Nonetheless, each time he passed into a fitful sleep he saw him, heard him, far more clearly than the memory of any dream. Kylo Ren, his sharp dark eyes cutting into Hux’s thoughts, the fabric of his black garments clinging and rippling with every movement of his body. And that body... Over and over again Hux envisioned it, the power in those long, lithe limbs; the strength in that broad chest and those thick shoulders. He was a force of nature, or an embodiment of nature itself: nature at its wildest and most mysterious. Ren was like a cross between a stag and a wolf: primal, pitiless, kingly. And even as Hux pushed away from the image of him, even as he endeavored to deny him, he could not ignore the reaction of his own body to the vision of Ren, to the memory of his voice, his lips, the brush of his gloved hand against Hux’s hair. Heat bloomed in his core, flooded his face, and he woke late in the evening drenched in sweat, hard and throbbing beneath the sheet. It was an odd reaction to a creature that had threatened and tormented him, and it left Hux feeling angry and cold.

Rising early the next morning, the symptoms of his brief illness having dissipated in the night, Hux ordered the laborers back out to the hill, then spent some hours continuing to assess the pitiful quality of his uncle’s library.. In the early afternoon he went to one of the windows on the front of the house and checked on the progress. A chunk had been bitten out of the grove of trees, and the splintered boles of oak and ash were strewn across the grass of the slope like scattered matchsticks, but the work was still not progressing as quickly as Hux desired. On a whim, he called for Mitaka to have his horse saddled. He would ride out and supervise his cowardly laborers: perhaps his presence on the scene would spur them to work more diligently. Before he left the house, however, Hux took a pistol from one of the cases in his uncle’s gun room. It was no weakness to take precautions, after all.

One of the grooms walked Executor out into the courtyard, holding the charger by the reins at arm’s length. “He’s got his dander up today, my lord,” the man said as Executor tossed his great head violently, his black mane and tail thrashing the air, eyes rolling. He stepped sideways suddenly and the groomsman had to jump to prevent his foot being crushed beneath a massive hoof. “Don’t know what’s gotten into him.”

“I can handle him,” Hux growled, snatching the reins from the groom’s hands and patting Executor’s neck with an approximation of fondness. The horse whipped its head around and snapped its teeth mere inches from Hux’s head.

“Damn you, you brute!” Hux hissed, and jerking harder than necessary on the bridle, he hauled himself up into the saddle.

“I warned you, sir,” the groom said, getting well away. “He’s woke up on the wrong side of his stall.”

“Well he’ll feel the sting of my crop if he keeps up this behavior,” Hux said, and he dug his heels into the charger’s flanks. Executor jumped forward and Hux steered him from the courtyard, out upon the path that led to the hill.

As soon as he’d given the horse a bit of free rein, however, Hux knew that something was very wrong. Executor was always high-spirited, but never willful: he knew his master and he obeyed the gentlest tug of the bit, the slightest brush of the crop. Today, however, the horse seemed as one possessed. He pulled in every direction opposite to Hux’s demands and tossed his head in a frenzy, white foam billowing from his mouth. With a forward leap that almost knocked Hux from the saddle, Executor left the pathway and barreled directly towards the thick woodland across the meadow.

“What has gotten into you, you devil!” Hux cried as the horse bounded into the forest, twisting and dodging between the tree trunks. It plowed through the thick undergrowth, small branches whipping at Hux’s face as the horse careened wildly, going deeper and deeper into the silent darkness of the forest. Hux lost hold of his riding crop, grasping the reins tightly with both hands, pulling back desperately to slow the horse’s forward momentum, but nothing seemed to faze the beast: it charged on, bounding at full speed towards some destination of its own.

In a dazed, distant manner, Hux became increasingly aware of strange, subtle changes in Executor’s appearance. His ears, for one thing, seemed suddenly much larger and longer than they had ever looked before, oddly pointed at each tip. His mane, too, seemed thicker, the coarse hair interspersed with tangled green weeds. And when the charger threw his head to one side, Hux caught sight of a wildly rolling eye that gleamed red in the twilight beneath the trees.

It was then that he realized that the beast he was riding was not Executor at all.

Bursting suddenly into a clearing partially filled with a stagnant, moss-coated pond, the horse gave a shrill scream and dug its hooves into the moist earth, projecting Hux out of the saddle and over its head. Hux landed with a dull thud upon the ground, then scrambled to crawl backwards before the beast trampled him. But the horse - which Hux found was looking less and less like a normal horse with each passing minute - did not advance, but stood still on the edge of the pond, throwing its wild mane and pawing frantically at the soil.

“You do not seem able to control your horse, Lord Hux,” a cold voice drawled lazily, and Hux turned himself over to see Kylo Ren standing knee-deep in the dark waters of the pond. He advanced slowly, his black cloak rippling behind him as he ascended the short slope, water streaming down his tight black breeches, stepping over Hux’s body as if he were no more than a fallen log.

“That is no doubt because it is not my horse!” Hux cried.

“No, you’re right. He's mine.” Ren approached the beast and raised his hands to its head. The creature instantly grew calm and Ren stroked it, murmuring words in a strange, sharp tongue Hux could not identify. “The most beautiful of all beasts.” He cupped one of the horse’s abnormally long ears in his hand, whispered something, and with a screeching sound that was barely audible yet made Hux’s eardrums reverberate, the creature bounded forward into the waters of the pond.

Before Hux’s aghast eyes the horse’s neck seemed to elongate, growing almost serpentine in its arching curve, its head lengthening too until it became almost skeletal. Its red eyes rolled in their sockets and its tail struck the surface of the water with a sound like a thunderclap before it reached the middle of the pool and ducked below the scum and lily pads, vanishing from sight.

“The kelpie is a noble beast, but volatile,” Ren said, watching as the waters of the pond stilled, concealing its secret depths. “It obeys the king of the Sith, which is fortunate for you. If it did not, it would have dragged you down into those waters and devoured everything but your entrails.”

“What a charming pet,” Hux spat, getting to his feet. “Perhaps you should try keeping a cat instead.”

“Oh, I have,” Ren said. “My halls are filled with the _cat sith_ , though I am not sure you would recognize them as felines. They are certainly far superior to that pitiful orange creature you keep.”

Hux stared at him. “How do you know about Millicent?”

Ren smirked. It was a most aggravating expression: full of conceit and cruelty, but markedly devoid of humor. “I know everything, _my lord_ ,” he said, his tone mocking. “You dwell upon my lands, remember. My tenant. My vassal. My-- guest.”

He walked slowly towards Hux and Hux - to his shame - found himself instinctively backing away, until his back collided with the trunk of a tree, trapping him. Ren raised a hand and turned it gently, and the dry leaves of innumerable autumns that carpeted the ground rose into the air and swirled slowly, soundlessly around them, as if they stood alone in the eye of a hurricane.

“I watched you, that first night you arrived,” Ren said, drawing closer, making Hux shrink a little against the tree. “In the forest. Saw you alight from your carriage.” He lifted a gloved hand and pushed back a strand of flaming red hair that had fallen into Hux’s eyes. His touch was, once again, remarkably gentle. “I wasn’t there myself, of course. But some of my people were – it was they that spooked your horses. I can gaze through their eyes, when I wish to. That it one of the benefits of my kingship.” Ren kept toying with Hux’s hair, passing tufts softly between his fingertips as if mesmerized.

“Where are your hideous, white-faced friends now?” Hux asked, making an effort at bravado though his voice was tremulous. His hands dug into the bark of the tree behind him, as if to find some kind of weapon stashed there; his gun was in its holster on his saddle, and his saddle was floating half-submerged in the pond.

“My people cannot abide the sunlight,” Ren answered calmly. “But I am immune to such considerations.”

“Yes,” Hux nodded, “because you are human.”

A shadow flickered across Ren’s face, a sharp glint passing like light reflected from a knife blade on the surface of his eyes. “I have overcome that weakness,” he said, his voice low and cold. “I have become something more.”

“A king.” Hux nodded. “In a subterranean cavern. Ruler of a forgotten people.”

Ren’s mouth twitched, but he held his temper in check except to hold up a hand and, with some invisible power, press Hux immovably up against the tree. With his arms locked at his sides, his legs fixed, Hux masked his fear with a sneer and held his chin high.

“You know so very little,” Ren said, leaning in closer, head tilted, mouth mere inches from Hux’s own. “You comprehend even less. Why do you continue to take advantage of my hospitality? To disrespect the ways of my people?”

“I do not recognize the legitimacy of you or your people,” Hux answered through gritted teeth. “Nor your claims upon this land which belongs to me and me alone! Do your people pay taxes to the Crown? Have your people titles or deeds filed away somewhere that you might bring before a magistrate, to prove your prior claim? No. You have nothing. You have no claim upon anything in this world, for you have forsaken it. You belong to an ancient, superstitious past, a past of darkness that is powerless in this modern, enlightened world--"

Hux stopped abruptly, finding himself suddenly staring at the burnished blade of a sword that had materialized suddenly in Ren’s hand. It was a wicked looking weapon: double-bladed, with a cross-guard that, on each side, tapered into a stiletto with sharp, cruel tips. Ren lifted and lowered the sword so that Hux could take in the lethal length of its blade, and Hux winced and turned his head aside.

“Those things that you mentioned, those things that give you power and currency in your enlightened, modern world,” Ren said softly, “—deeds and titles and seats in Parliament— they are nothing to the power we possess. Your king is nothing, his armies and navies are nothing: all the ships of his fleet, all his legions of horsemen, all his palaces and castles — nothing. Nothing compared to the power we wield.”

Hux risked another glance at the sword and, when he did, he saw that it was lit with a red gleam that ran along its polished surface like a cold, silent fire.

_Artwork by[Parasitebeans](http://parasitebeans.tumblr.com)_

“It is the very force of existence, our power,” Ren continued, watching the red flames ripple along the silver steel. “It is the thing that uncurls every leaf, the energy that drives every wind. If we wished to we could steal the breath of every man, woman, and child; as they slept we could squeeze their souls from their bodies and end the pernicious existence of humankind. But we refrain. Not out of weakness: out of mercy. So long as our prohibitions are upheld, so long as we are shown the proper respect.” And here Ren brought the sword forward, holding it upright, until one of the small cross-guard blades lay flat against Hux’s cheek. Pain seared into his flesh, a fire of bitter coldness splitting open his skin.

But he did not cry out. As he met Ren’s dark eyes he realized something, and the revelation jolted him, supplying him with a way to distract his interrogator, to make the pain end. “You are miserable,” he said quietly, and he watched as the expression of Ren’s eyes changed, the angle of the light altering. “You are so very alone.”

Ren backed away. The pain ended, the red fire faded from the blade of the sword, and the spell of immobility on Hux’s limbs was lifted. He brought up his hand and touched his fingertips to his cheek: there was no wound, not even a scratch. Ren was staring at him.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Hux said. “A human child, stolen from your family. Isolated away from your kind, like a boy raised by wolves in the wilderness. You cloak yourself in power and menace, but all you are is a lost child, miserable and alone.”

Ren’s pale face twisted in an expression of anguished rage. “You know nothing!” he spat. But Hux shook his head.

“Misery? Loneliness? I know them. They have always been my close companions.”

Perhaps it was nothing but a figment of Hux’s imagination, an illusion of the half-light beneath the trees. But it seemed that Ren’s black eyes were welling, brimming suddenly with unshed tears. He jerked away from Hux and raised his hand again, hard upwards, and the whirlwind of leaves grew thicker, swirled faster, until they closed in, beating against Hux’s face and body, blinding him, the sound of crackling like a wildfire swallowing him whole. He couldn’t breathe in the maelstrom, couldn’t keep his balance: his head was spinning with the leaves and he was thoroughly disoriented. Soon enough he fell down upon the ground in a daze.

Then-- absolute silence. Stillness. Hux opened his eyes and found his head laying upon a tree root, his body buried beneath several feet of leaves. He sat up, shaking them off, scattering them, and looked around. The pond lay motionless beneath the darkening sky.

Kylo Ren was gone.

Pulling in a desperate, shuddering breath, Hux stumbled out of the clearing. His saddle had long since disappeared beneath the waters of the pond. After some aimless wandering he found the path of broken foliage that the kelpie had created when it bolted into the wood, tottering weakly along it until he reached the park and turned his feet toward the house. A figure was standing at the top of the stairs to the entryway and, spotting him, began to run in his direction. Mitaka. He was winded when he reached Hux and had to bend over for a moment, grasping his knees and breathing hard before he could speak.

“My lord! We’ve been searching-- We didn’t know-- Thought--"

Hux understood. Sighing, he asked: “How long, Mitaka? How long have I been out there?”

“Three days, my lord. Exactly three days.”

He does not even have to take me piece by piece, Hux thought. He is stealing my life away, a little at a time: six hours of one night, three days of one week. He turned and looked at the distant hill.

“It is only a little past sundown,” he said to Mitaka. “Where are the workmen?”

Mitaka gaped at him. “I did not-- They were part of the search parties. I did not think--"

“There are still trees on that hill!” Hux cried angrily, thrusting his finger in that direction. “Get them out at dawn with their axes. I want them gone - all gone!”

“Yes, my lord,” Mitaka stammered. “But-- surely, sir-- surely now you would agree that it isn’t safe--"

“I will not be intimidated on my own land, in my own house!” Hux practically screamed it, turning away from Mitaka to shout it into the sky, and at the shadowed hill fading into the dusk. “I am the master here! And I will make sure that everyone knows it!”

He left Mitaka standing on the gravel and strode inside, heading straight to his uncle’s library.


	6. Mingling Hands and Mingling Glances

_Of the origin of the Sith, as with the origin of all the denizens of that which is called Faery, very little can be known. Theologians speculate that they number among the fallen angels who, cast out of Heaven, landed upon Earth as a people outside the ordinary order of things, for whom the gift of Salvation is eternally withheld. Others assert that they are, in fact, our own ancestors, the spirits of the dead unable to rest or buried without consecration, who wander endlessly the hills and valleys of their mortal residence, taking sustenance from their living kin. Yet other scholars believe that the Sith are neither immortal angels nor the souls of departed mortals, but are another species entirely, of strange and subtle bodies that may shift shape or grow invisible or ride the night wind like the tatters of clouds. What is agreed upon by everyone who has made a study of them, however, is that their powers over the forces of nature are considerable, their anger quick to be roused and difficult to appease, and their motivations of no ordinary nature: for it seems they are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, but infinitely neutral, obeying no law except their own._

It was the thirtieth or so book Hux had found on his uncle’s library shelves, and the words seemed to swim before his tired eyes: he took a break from his reading to rub them. He had not slept, but spent the whole night searching through his uncle’s numerous volumes, finding dozens upon dozens of texts devoted to the study of his disagreeable neighbors. But none had yet given him the answers he sought, and it was already coming up on noon on the day after his return from the woods. Outside, carried on the still air from the distant hillside, the ringing of axes and grinding rhythm of saws reached his ears and he knew that the work progressed. By dusk at least half of the trees on the hill would be felled. 

It was likely to earn him another visitation, perhaps the final one, the one that would decide his fate. And it was this that Hux needed desperately to prevent.

He flipped the musty pages of the thick volume on the desk before him, watching their yellowed edges blur before his eyes. Then he caught a word and, frantically, fingered backwards, creasing each page in the haste with which he turned them. Finally, the beginning of a new chapter stared up at him and his heartbeat quickened at the sight of the bold print words:

_**Methods of Protection Efficacious Against the Sith** _

Hux jerked upright in his chair and leaned forward, devouring the text, one finger skimming each sentence so that he did not lose his place. When he had read the whole of the chapter, he snatched the book up against his chest and ran from the library for the first time in sixteen hours, shouting for Mitaka.

“Yes, my lord?” the man said, sliding through a doorway at the far end of the corridor.

“Send the servants out to the stables, to the attic, anywhere there might be tools and pieces of scrap,” he ordered. Mitaka’s brow wrinkled with confusion.

“Sir??”

“Iron, Mitaka!” Hux cried. “Iron!”

It took the rest of the afternoon and much of the early evening, Hux even joining in the labor, sorting through kitchen cupboards and sideboard drawers while the cook and scullery maids looked on in astonished silence. But a pile of iron objects was soon accumulated in the entryway and these were then dispersed all through the house: hammered into doors and thresholds, hung from the apex of archways, concealed under rugs and between mattresses. Hux stuck two iron daggers into the doorjamb of his bedchamber, another between the halves of his window, a piece of scrap iron beneath his hearth rug, an iron awl beneath his pillow. And though it was not made of iron, he took an old sword down from the wall of his uncle’s study, a polished relic of the old man’s army days, and set it at the foot of his bed. Then he settled in to wait. The sound of the axes and saws ended with the sunset and the room grew gloomy until Mitaka came, lighting tapers, stoking the fire, and offering to bring up Hux’s supper. He refused it but ordered his bath to be drawn instead, for he had not washed since his return from the forest and bits of the hurricane of leaves still clung, scratching, to his skin.

Immersing his body in warm water usually relaxed him, but not that evening. His nerves were too excited, every muscle too tensed. Rising from the bath Hux dressed in a fresh pair of breeches, but left his chest and feet bare, throwing a silk dressing gown over his shoulders against the chill drafts: a compromise between dressing for bed and being prepared, at a moment’s notice, to defend his life. For surely his intransigence had bought him a third visit and, this time, Hux very much doubted that Ren would be in the mood to softly pat his hair and let him walk away.

Unless, of course, he made it too difficult for Ren to reach him.

_The Sith cannot abide the touch of iron_ , the book in his uncle’s library had read. _To come even in close proximity to the metal is abhorrent to them. Objects made of iron, when placed in or above doorways, windows, or hearths – or secreted away beneath beds and cribs – will prevent the Sith from entering or drawing too near the place where the accursed metal is hidden_.

So he had taken what precautions he could. And yet…

And yet he almost regretted it. As Hux paced his bedroom floor - sitting down in a chair by the hearth from time to time, only to rise quickly and resume his pacing – he could not deny a longing to look again upon Kylo Ren’s visage. Despite his terror, despite the cruel fate to which Ren had threatened to put him during their first meeting, Hux was all too aware of the excitement that prickled his skin, that sent tendrils of fire snaking through every vein whenever Ren was near. Never had he been so attracted, so fascinated – and so simultaneously repelled – by any creature, and the horror and contradiction of it was enthralling. Hux despised himself for it, but there it was: he could hardly ever sleep without dreaming of Ren, and when he woke it was to find himself possessed by equal parts terror – and longing.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked off the minutes as Hux wandered the room, not daring to sleep. His sequestration away from the rest of the house brought back unpleasant memories. Hadn’t he spent most of his childhood just like this, closed away in quiet rooms in some distant part of the house, away from his mother’s society acquaintances, out of the way of his father’s ambition? Left to entertain himself in solitude: out of sight, out of mind. The remembrance brought a bitter tang to his mouth and he tried to push the memories away. Exhaustion often brought such miserable scenes to his mind, and so he sat down again in the chair by the hearth, soon joined by Millicent who leaped into his lap and curled herself into a softly vibrating ball. Hux allowed his eyelids to close, intending only to rest for a moment. But the heat of the fire worked into his flesh and soon enough he was asleep.

“Did you really believe iron would work against me?”

Hux jolted awake. Millicent was standing on his lap, back arched, hissing. The window across the room was open and Kylo Ren was sitting on the ledge, one boot propped up upon the frame, one arm draped over his knee, that irritating smirk upon his lips. Hux scrambled out of his chair, dumping Millicent upon the carpet, and grasped the sword from the foot of the bed. Tensed like a spring, he unsheathed it: metal rang on metal and before he could brandish the weapon the sword flew from his hand and struck against the hearth with a loud clang.

Ren shook his head. “Still you persist in being inhospitable.”

“How did you get in?” Hux gasped. “Iron is supposed to stop you--"

“Iron is painful to the Sith, that is true,” Ren said, standing and slowly advancing towards him. He was not wearing gloves and Hux noticed, for the first time, the size of his hands, the length of his pale, slender fingers. Would they close around his throat now, he wondered? Or could he choke the life out of him from a distance in the same way that he could stir up autumn leaves, as he could send a heavy sword flying across the room? “It burns them, with the same intensity as you would feel if you stuck your hand into that fire. But I am not a Sith, as you yourself said the last time we met. I am one of them but not of them. Their king but not of their kind. I am human – or, at least, I was once. A long time ago.”

A sharp, fearsome hiss sounded from the hearth rug and Ren turned to look at Millicent. The cat had made herself appear twice as large as normal by puffing out every strand of fur in a display of aggression, and she bared her fangs each time she spat. But Ren merely knelt and uttered one word in a harsh, guttural language Hux could not understand – the same language he had used to speak to the kelpie, Hux realized – and Millicent, suddenly as docile as a lamb, ran to him on dainty, prancing paws, her sleek tail undulating.

Kylo Ren picked up the cat and held her against his broad chest, stroking her head. “Put her down!” Hux cried, seething, but Ren ignored him. 

“She is most amiable – are you not, little one?” he asked, turning Millicent so that he could glance into her eyes. “One kind word and, see? I have her purring.” He lifted Millicent to face level again, regarding her with a quizzical smile. “What must I do to get her master to behave the same way?”

“I am not some animal,” Hux sneered. “I will never purr for you!”

“Will you not?” Ren set Millicent gently down upon the floor, then drew closer to Hux, backing him step by step up against the nearest wall. “You see, the last time we met I realized something about you.”

Hux swallowed as his back collided with the wall. There was no escape. “You realized that you want to kill me, I suppose. That you need to kill me. Because I’m stubborn and won’t bend my knee to you. So I must be disposed of. A fellow human being. All because of your unnatural subjects, the same creatures that stole you away--"

Ren tilted his head to one side and Hux was surprised by the calm intrigue in his expression, the lack of anger. “At first, perhaps. That is one punishment for those who disobey. But then I realized why you said the things you did during our last conversation. That only someone who had felt those same things – the emptiness, the loneliness of existence – could recognize them in me.” He reached up and, to Hux’s astonishment, did nothing more than stroke his hair again. “Bright – like the sunlight,” he murmured. “But you – you’ve lived in the darkness too.”

“Of course I’ve lived in the darkness!” Hux spat suddenly, twisting out of Ren’s reach and walking swiftly away, putting a good ten feet or so between them. The blood was pounding so loudly in his ears he was certain Ren could hear it, a drumbeat pulsing under every other sound. “You – you pathetic, stupid creature!” he cried, no longer caring what punishment his words earned him. “You wallow in your misery, your anger, because you were stolen away from your mother and father, because nobody ever loved you. Well, guess what? You’re not so unique. Until a year ago I had a mother; until a month ago a father. And they never loved me, not for one second of my miserable life! I was an encumbrance to them, a debt that had to be paid, a duty that had to be performed, the continuance of a name: not a child, not a boy who felt fear or loneliness, who longed to be held, who wanted to be told that he was worth something, anything! Yet you – you, the great and mighty Kylo Ren, lord of the Sith – everyone should bow down to you in your misery, in your self-loathing, in your hatred for all humankind!”

Hux expected the blow, braced himself against it, but it didn’t fall. Ren simply shrugged. “You demand exactly the same.”

“How?” Hux cried, bewildered. “How is my behavior anything like yours?”

“You demand respect. Obedience. You bully your servants, your tenants, your workmen. You want even nature, even the trees and the hills, to shape themselves to your demands. You are alone, in this house: alone but for the people you boss and despise, alone with nothing but a title, and what is that but a word? It’s all you possess.”

Hux’s voice failed him. His mind failed him, reeling at the keenness with which Ren’s words cut: sharper, surer than any blade. His knees buckled and he sank slowly down upon the edge of the bed, grasping the bedpost with one hand to stay upright.

“We’re more alike, you and I, then either of us would care to admit,” Ren said, and he walked over to stand just in front of Hux, so close that Hux could smell his scent: an earthy freshness, like the forest on a night in winter, cool and clean beneath the stars. To his astonishment Ren shrugged off his cloak, then began to unfasten the toggles that closed his tunic, slowly baring his chest to Hux’s sight. Long and pale, broad and well muscled, his skin was covered with strange designs: interlocking circles and spirals, reminiscent of ones Hux has seen once carved into the surface of an ancient standing stone. They were scarlet, standing out vividly against Ren’s white flesh.

Ren put his fingers beneath Hux’s chin and tilted his head up until their eyes met. “Touch me,” he said. Hux’s mouth fell open in surprise.

He rose to his feet. “What?”

“Touch me. Just here.” And Ren took his hand and placed his fingers at the start of a spiral just below his left pectoral. The marking felt warm beneath Hux’s fingers: it seemed to pulse softly, and after a moment the red of the pigment began to gleam, the color seeping into Hux’s hand. A thrill of heat swept up his arm, into his chest, traveling all through his nerves until it reached his brain, and Hux reeled at the overwhelming sensation.

“Can you feel it?” Ren’s eyes were closed, his head tilted slightly back. “Can you see it?”

“Yes.” Visions were passing in quick succession across the surface of Hux’s inner eye, eons of time unfolding over the land. Seeds sprouted and shot up into mighty trees; the trees were struck by lightning bolts and burned, and from their ashes more trees grew, vast forests stretching over hills that had been barren only seconds before. Hills rose and were cut in half by flooded streams; cliffs appeared then crumbled into encroaching seas. Primitive people in furs and skins crept across the land and disappeared; others came, bearing iron swords and shields, their skin painted with strange blue patterns. The forests expanded, then began to constrict, dwindling into smaller and smaller patches on the surface of the land as structures emerged, as fields were tilled and fenced, and tendrils of smoke rose from thousands upon thousands of chimneys.

“Do you understand?” Ren asked. “I am a part of all of this. I am more than one stolen child. What is loneliness and misery compared to all of this? The Sith have endured, they will endure. Long after every trace of humanity is washed away.”

“I understand,” Hux said slowly. “But-- what good is immortality if you must go through it all alone?”

Ren let go of his hand, but Hux did not withdraw it. He continued to trace that spiral, then moved his fingers to another pattern, this one traveling down over the tight plane of Ren’s stomach. He could feel the hardness of the muscles there, could hear the breath that Ren sucked in to be so touched, and he let his fingers continue to wander, though each new pattern he touched brought more visions to his mind until his head ached with them. He saw a little stone cottage, set against the eaves of the forest; a rail fence on which a patchwork quilt was hanging in the sun to dry. He saw a large, shaggy brown dog, bounding happily through the open gate and a woman… A small, smiling woman in a plain dress and apron, her braided brown hair pinned in a bun to the back of her head, her dark eyes sparkling in the daylight…

“Stop,” Ren murmured, squeezing his eyes shut, reaching for Hux’s hands, but Hux kept moving them, out of his grasp.

“Is there no where I can touch you without these infernal images,” Hux gasped, surprised by the heat that was pooling inside him, the sweat on his palms, the excited tingle that made his fingers shake. 

“You don’t need to see anymore.”

“I don’t want to see anymore,” Hux told him, looking into his eyes. “I just want to touch you.” And in one quick movement, he lifted both his hands from Ren’s chest and laid them on either side of his face. “I want…” he began, but his words died unspoken. He pressed his mouth to Ren’s lips.

The kiss felt like electricity, like the accidental spark generated by two hands brushing in a dry room. There was a slight tinge of pain, and a hot flood of pleasure. Ren’s lips were soft, thick, and Hux opened his mouth to suck them, to pull them between his own, to taste them fully, completely, and Ren reciprocated, tilting his head to one side to drink Hux deeper. Slowly he edged him backwards until the back of Hux’s knees collided with the mattress and he eased down upon it, Ren following, distributing the weight of his body against Hux’s lithe frame. Hux ran his hands down Ren’s sides, slid them over the muscles of his back that stirred and undulated beneath his skin as he kissed Hux, as he worked his tongue hungrily, and Hux ignored the images generated by the patterns until they faded into insignificance, the only thing that mattered being the feeling of Ren’s body beneath his fingers and palms. With one hand he brushed over Ren’s nipples, hard and swollen, while with the other he raked eager fingers through his soft, thick hair, and he heard and felt Ren’s groan of excitement, the desperate higher note of need in his deep tone.

“Now you understand,” Hux whispered, breaking their kiss for a moment to breathe. “I have my own kind of primal power.”

Ren’s dark eyes were blazing as they jumped from Hux’s stare to his parted, panting lips, and back to his gaze. “You don’t understand what you’re doing,” he murmured.

“I think I do.” Hux leaned up and slid his tongue between Ren’s lips, into the warm wetness of his all too human mouth.

“You don’t,” Ren gasped when he had the chance to speak. “I am other. It is dangerous, for a mortal--"

“I’ll take my chances.” Hux pulled Ren harder down upon him and their mouths met again in a frenzy of desperation, in a kiss that bordered on the verge of being a bite, holding one another in an embrace that was close to being a grapple. Hux rolled Ren beneath him, only for Ren to push him back and pin him down against the mattress, withdrawing his mouth to begin working it down Hux’s bare chest. Hux choked on a moan and tangled the fingers of both hands in Ren’s hair as he moved his lips and tongue over the landscape of his body, tasting collarbone and nipple, sternum and ribs, mouthing at the tender skin of his stomach as Hux writhed, his back arching, his body rising with need.

“Say it,” Ren whispered suddenly, catching Hux off guard. He lifted his eyes and looked at Hux through his thick black eyelashes. 

“Say what?”

“Say that I’m your lord and master.”

A cold spasm passed through Hux’s body. “No.”

Ren stroked one hand down over Hux’s chest, over the glistening patches of saliva where he had kissed and tongued and tasted him, until his fingers rested on the placket of Hux’s breeches. “Call me your lord and master.”

Hux whimpered. Ren’s fingers toyed with the buttons that fastened the placket, drawing dangerously close to the epicenter of his excitement before ghosting away. “Nnn-no,” he muttered, shaking his head. “I will never say that.”

“Say it,” Ren whispered, an edge to his voice, and he parted his lips to lick along the line of ginger hair that ran from the base of Hux’s navel to disappear beneath the waistband of his breeches. Hux wanted to scream. “Say it or I will leave you in this misery without relief.”

Hux gasped in a great mouthful of air, trying to suppress it, to resist it: the aching throb of his manhood as it pressed against the solidity of Ren’s chest. He could not, would not, say such a thing… Ren lowered his head and brushed the tip of his nose against Hux’s groin, exhaled warm breath that seeped through the cloth of his breeches and made him twitch and leak.

“You’re my lord and master!” Hux whined, crumbling beneath the intensity of his desire. And smirking – that horrible smirk, Hux longed to bite it off Ren’s face – Kylo Ren rose and eased his weight down upon Hux’s body, his mouth capturing Hux’s lips while his fingers – those long, supple fingers – unfastened and slid and traced and wrapped firmly around…

And Hux was utterly lost.


	7. Unquiet Dreams

At first he thought it was a fever of ecstasy into which he had fallen, a heat of pleasure so intense and otherworldly that it overpowered all his sense and shut down his conscious mind. His body reverberated with the intensity of his passion, but he was separated from his flesh and bones, soaring above it in the ether, then plummeting down through fields of stars. And the further he fell, the greater the gulf between his mind and his body grew, or the greater the difference between the man he had been an hour before and the thing he was becoming.

The body he had left behind was burning: that was the one thing Hux knew for certain. Drenched in sweat, it writhed in the fine sheets of his bed, gasping at the cold air that seared his throat and lungs with each desperate inhalation. He twitched and trembled though his limbs felt like lead; flames licked his body and he shivered from the chill, and he was murmuring a string of senseless words, a river of nouns and verbs that together formed no meaning, and a scream he did not intend to give erupted from his lips.

Yet his mind: Hux’s mind was unfettered, it roamed free and in the space between rapid heartbeats he saw a thousand faces, a million strange landscapes unfolding and turning like galaxies before the eyes of his thought. He saw a land of green hills, unblemished by any mark of human cultivation, rolling into a distance softened by a blanket of mist. He saw vast woodland, leafy canopies of mighty boughs hiding a perpetual twilight at their feet. And as he drew nearer to the forest, he saw between the pillar-like trunks of great oaks and ash, elm and chestnut, millions upon millions of small lights, pinpricks of white on the velvet blackness, bright as fireflies, numerous as flakes of snow, but immovable, fixed. Drawn closer and closer, pulled like a fallen leaf to the vortex of a storm, Hux suddenly realized that the forest contained a galaxy and the lights were all the stars of the firmament - uncountable, endless - and all of it was his: his possession, his property, his realm…

“His blood flows with the force of nature,” a woman said, and Phasma’s face swam into view above him, quick eyes gazing with a piercing blue brightness. “He will never be the same now. If he survives, that is.”

Someone screamed, howled: it was the cry of a hunting owl, the shriek of a terrified beast caught in a snare, the keening of the risen dead. Hux knew, with some vague sense, that it was his voice, his own cry.

He saw again the forest of stars and he walked through them, treading stars beneath his feet, sweeping stars away with his fingertips, cold little fires against his skin. And then the stars drew together, two by two, and they became but points of reflected light in the black eyes of the white creatures, the Sith. But Hux no longer feared them. For walking at his side was Kylo Ren, his black cloak curling in a sudden wind to envelop them both, blotting out the manifold eyes, the stars, the trees, until there was nothing left but the two of them, the heat of their bodies and the dual drumming of their human hearts. He clung to Ren, wrapped in his crushing embrace, unafraid of losing all the air in his lungs: mortal death being a small price to pay for this feeling, this unexpected wholeness.

“I must go now,” Ren murmured into Hux’s hair, and he drew his arms from Hux’s body. Hux grabbed at his tunic, his cloak, but the fabric was like black water and slipped through his fingers.

“Why?” Hux demanded. “Where must you go?”

Ren pulled back enough to allow him to look into Hux’s face. He touched his cheek, stroked it with unfathomable gentleness. “Back to my people.”

“Then let me come with you,” Hux said, but Ren shook his head, his expression sad.

“You are mortal. I am not: not now. I return to my kingdom.”

“Then what of me?” Hux cried. “You did this to me! You brought me out here, into this wilderness – now you will leave me?” Even as Hux spoke Ren was backing away, the black of his clothes melding with the darkness of the forest until his face was only a vague blur of white in a vast, impenetrable night. “Where am I to go?’ Hux screamed.

Ren had vanished but his voice came to Hux with startling loudness, murmured directly into his ear.

_To death_.

Hux woke with a start, shaking the whole bed frame with the violence of his return to consciousness.

“My lord?”

Squinting, his vision blurred and his surroundings dimly lit, Hux perceived the interior of a room filled with figures moving quickly from side to side, shifting on their feet, drawing closer to him then backing quickly away. No: not figures, but shadows, gyrations of shade cast by the guttering of the few candles that were lit in the wall sconces. He was in his bedchamber and only one person was present, sitting in a chair at his bedside, peering closely at his face.

“Mitaka?”

“Yes, my lord. You’ve come back to us at last, sir. We despaired for a time.”

Hux struggled into a sitting position against a stack of pillows and Mitaka jumped to his feet, bringing a cup of cold water to his lips. Hux drank gratefully, his throat parched, then he took another look around his bedchamber, surprised to see that everything appeared normal, his eyes beginning to focus clearly. He was clad in his nightshirt and his jaw, when he lifted his hand curiously to feel it, was covered in a thick growth of sharp hairs.

“How long?” he asked, his voice deeper and more hoarse than normal.

“Your illness, sir? Almost five days now.” Mitaka busied himself with straightening the blankets, smoothing them beneath his palms. “We summoned a physician on the first morning, a different one on the second day. Neither of them could determine what ailed you, what had caused your sickness--"

“He caused it,” Hux said without thinking. Mitaka’s eyes grew round.

“He, sir?”

Hux sighed and waved his hand. “Go on, Mitaka. How did these idiot physicians treat me, then, if they did not know what ailed me?”

“They didn’t treat you,” Mitaka told him, and he dropped his gaze, seeming suddenly afraid to look Hux in the eye. “Your fever grew worse every day and by yesterday we-- We believed you would not last the night. But then--" He swallowed audibly. “She came to the door, yesterday evening. That woman: Phasma. She said that she knew you were ill and that she could help you. We-- were desperate, sir--"

To Mitaka’s surprise, Hux gave a soft laugh. He leaned his head back against the headboard and briefly let his eyes drift closed. He knew what he was see imprinted on the darkness of his eyelids – and so he did. That long, pale face. Those full lips, those black, haunted eyes.

“Help me?” he repeated. “There is no one who can help me now, Mitaka.”

“S-she brewed up some sort of concoction, right over there in the hearth,” Mitaka continued, stammering slightly in his confusion over Hux’s declaration. “”It smelled of – of rosemary, or some such herb. She put it to your lips and made you drink a little of it, then she made some kind of sign over your brow, your mouth, your chest – murmuring something in some language I could not understand. Then she told us that it was up to you, whether you would live or not. That you would make your own choice. Then she was gone.”

Hux glanced at the man, his round nervous eyes glistening in the candlelight. “What choice did I make, Mitaka?”

“To-- to live, my lord, I should think,” Mitaka answered falteringly.

“I am not so sure.” And Hux lapsed into a momentary silence.

Mitaka stared at him for a moment, his lips moving without making a sound, some kind of debate clearly raging internally about giving voice to his thoughts. Then, pulling his chair a little closer to the bedside, he spoke in soft, rushed tones.

“I think that I saw him, my lord.”

Now it was Hux’s turn to stare, wide-eyed. “Saw who?”

“Him. I don’t know who, but you said it just a moment ago, that he caused your illness. I think--" Mitaka paused nervously. “Whoever, whatever, he is, I think-- _I think I saw him_. One evening, a few days ago. I left you for a few minutes, just so I could get a bite to eat, and when I returned, I-- It seemed to me that someone was standing at your bedside. Someone tall, dressed all in black. He had no eyes, no face…”

“You saw nothing, Mitaka,” Hux said flatly, though his heart was pounding hard against his breastbone. “The bed curtains, shadows… You saw nothing.”

Mitaka hesitated, then nodded. “Yes, my lord. Of course.” But he looked utterly unconvinced.

“I’m hungry, Mitaka,” Hux lied. “Go and fetch me some breakfast. It is morning, is it not? I can hardly tell with those curtains drawn.”

“Yes my lord. It is not yet nine, but it is a most dreary day.” 

When Mitaka had left, Hux slowly eased himself out of the bed. A lingering chill in his bones made him drag one of the quilts from the mattress and he wrapped this around his shoulders before venturing from the room.

The house seemed deserted: every corridor empty, silent, not a servant to be seen. Hux made his way slowly down to the first floor, to the dining room, cold without a fire in the grate, thick with shadows though the curtains were open. The grounds outside were covered in thick mist, the panes of glass in the windows slick with rain. Hux walked over to stand in front of the old painting. The ghastly white faces of the Sith peered out at him from behind the trees, cold and impassive, and Hux imagined that he could feel the cold clamminess of their bodies pressing close around him.

In the middle of the painting the pale, solemn-eyed child lay wrapped in his blanket, in a nest of tangled thorns. For some reason that he could not understand, Hux reached up and touched the child’s face, softly, until a sensation he had not felt in many years arrested him: a sharp sting in the corner of his eye. A sting followed by a wetness that spilled over the rim of his eye and tumbled down his cheek.

“He was my son, you know.”

Hux wheeled around, his heart in his throat. At the far end of the long room stood a man, a man Hux had never seen before, grey-haired and dressed in the simple homespun of a country farmer.

“Who are you?” Hux demanded, recovering himself – or at least feigning to. “How did you get into my house?”

“You’ve met him,” the man continued, ignoring Hux’s questions. “You understand.”

“You didn’t answer me. What is your name and your business here?” Hux asked as the man walked slowly toward him. He was an older man, handsome once – still handsome, though in a rugged, weather-beaten way, lines of time and care etched into his features.

“My name is Han Solo,” he said, and he gestured vaguely with his hand in the direction of the rain-soaked lawn outside the windows. “My lands, my cottage, are about two miles to the west of here, across the old stone bridge.” He lapsed into silence for a moment, looking into the distance as if he could through the mist, over the intervening miles of hill and wood and water, over the intervening years. “That’s where they took him. My son.” He nodded his head at the child in the painting. “Stole him during the night. Slipped into the cottage and lifted him from his crib. Spirited him away.”

“Your son--" Hux stared at the man. “Kylo Ren-- Kylo Ren is your son?”

“Ben,” the man corrected him. “My son’s name is Ben.”

“But why?” Hux asked, a dull fear coiling in his stomach. “Why did they take him?”

“Leia and I, we-- we’d never had him baptized. Or we dressed him too often in green clothes. Or red-- some such nonsense. God knows the reason. Maybe they just liked the way he looked: his pale skin, his black hair, his big dark eyes. Maybe there was something about him – he was precocious, Ben was,” Han said, grinning, memories rising almost visible behind his eyes. “He could speak before most kids, ran around outside pointing at flowers, trees, birds: giving their names. He had a way with animals: horses, the cattle – especially the dog. He loved that dog, and the dog loved him. Obeyed him better than he obeyed me. They were inseparable.” Han paused, frowning, glancing again at the painting. “But he wasn’t a happy child. He didn’t laugh. He rarely smiled. It was like there was something inside of him – eating away, gnawing at him. Some kind of knowledge that the rest of us never have. Some kind of eternal, painful truth. Maybe that’s what they sensed in him, that he knew too much to live among mortals. So they took him away.”

“You speak of him in the past tense,” Hux said, “as if he’s dead and gone. But I’ve met him. I’ve touched him. He’s alive, he’s right out there, under that hill--"

“That’s not Ben. They changed him. Twisted him, created him anew in their image. They’ve done it since the beginning of time: taken human children, with all their energy and strength, made them into their champions, their kings and queens. Chipping steadily away at their humanity until nothing of it remains and they become something-– something else. Something other.”

Hux was silent. Finally he said: “I don’t believe it’s too late for your son. He can yet be saved.”

Han shook his head sadly. “He’s enchanted you. Enthralled you. That’s what they do. He’s wrapped invisible chains around you, tied lead weights to your feet. But you’re right. It’s not too late to save him. To save yourself.”

Han held something out before him. It was a long narrow box made of polished wood, gilded at the edges with gold leaf. Hux glanced at it, then looked up at Han’s face. “What is it?”

“A dagger. An iron blade.” Slowly Han opened the lid of the box, showing Hux the narrow silver blade that lay inside it, its clean edges and plain leather hilt nestled on a bed of black velvet cloth. “Take it. And the next time you see Ben, plunge it straight into his heart.”

“Kill him?” Hux stared at the man, aghast. “You’re asking me to murder your own son?”

“I’m asking you to end the life of the creature that was my son,” Han explained. “To put that miserable thing out of its misery and, by so doing, to end the enchantment he’s placed over you. It’s the only way. The only way to free yourself. The only way Ben can be saved now.”

Hux looked down at the weapon. “But iron doesn’t work on him, don’t you know that? I tried it. I stashed pieces of iron in every doorway in this house, in every window. It didn’t stop him.”

“When it severs his heart, it will.” Han spoke with complete dispassion and Hux winced at his words. “And the greatest weapon you have now is not the dagger. You now possess his true name. Call him by it and it will weaken him. Long enough to allow you to do what must be done.”

“How can you charge me with this?” Hux asked. “It is a terrible burden.”

“It is an act of mercy.” Han sighed. “You think me cold, Lord Hux. Cruel. But what I am asking you to do is to save my son. If there was any other way, I would already have taken it. But there is not. Only by destroying him can you rescue him. And save yourself.”

Hesitantly, Hux reached forth and took the box in his hands. Han nodded and, without another word, he left the room.

Hux was seated at the table a minute or so later, staring down at the dagger - having yet to touch it or remove it from its box - when Mitaka entered. “There you are, sir. I took your breakfast in to your room but you were gone--"

“You might have told me that I had a visitor,” Hux said dully, not bothering to look up. “Did you show him out?”

“Sir?”

“That man. Han Solo. Did you show him out?”

Mitaka’s mouth gaped open, shut, then opened again. “There have been no visitors to the house this morning, my lord. I’ve seen no man.”

Hux looked at Mitaka, then rose and went quickly to the window. The windows of the dining room looked out over the gravel drive, down which any visitor - in a carriage or on foot - would depart the grounds. The man had left only a couple of minutes before and could not have gotten far in that space of time. But Hux saw no sign of him.

He clutched the wooden box in hands suddenly slick with nervous sweat. “Gather the other servants and remove all of the iron, Mitaka,” he ordered. “I’m expecting a visitor. I must be ready to receive him.”


	8. Sing Peace Unto His Breast

But he did not come.

Hux waited each day for dusk, expecting as soon as the sun sank beneath the western hills to hear his voice, to feel his presence. He kept the dagger with him at all times, tucked into his belt, ready to take it in hand and plunge it into that pale chest, until the beating heart beneath was pierced and stilled. But every night Kylo Ren disappointed him.

After a week he took to the woods, wandering aimlessly in the twilight beneath the trees, retracing the path of the kelpie back to the little clearing, the weed-choked pond. He rode Executor - the real Executor, this time - over the hills in the cool evening shadows, down roads that were little more than deer paths, along the edges of ancient bogs where insects chirped and will-o-the-wisps danced above stagnant black water. But he met no one, felt no one, and the blade of the dagger remained dry and clean in his belt.

In the middle of the second week Hux made the five mile journey into the nearest village, to the old churchyard with its crooked stones covered with clinging moss. A sexton with a handsome face and a thick thatch of dark curls was digging a fresh grave, standing waist-deep in the hole, but he pulled himself out at Hux’s approach and climbed to his feet, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his sleeve.

“Solo?” he repeated when Hux had asked his question. “Sure, I know where they lay. Over there, right around the corner of the church.”

Hux walked over and found the two graves, their small, simple stones leaning towards each other, the words etched upon them impossible to read beneath the felt-like covering of moss. Hux knelt and rubbed away at the faces of the stones until he had removed enough moss to discern the names and dates printed below.

 _Han Solo_ , read the marker on Hux’s left. _Leia Organa Solo_ , read the stone to his right. _Beloved husband and father. Beloved mother and wife_.

Hux pulled in a sharp breath, the cold air stinging his nostrils, redolent with the rich scent of decay.

The dates of their deaths were listed: Leia had died in 1575. Han in 1568.

Two-hundred and sixty-seven years ago.

“It’s a sad story,” said the sexton, who had come up to stand behind Hux. “All written out in the church records. They had a child, a son, but there’s no grave for him. He was stolen away from them when he was just a year or two old. Some of the country people say he was taken by the fairies, but-- well, you know how country people are.”

“Yes,” Hux said softly. “I know.”

“The man, Han — the records say he was killed, murdered — stabbed to death one night, just walking across his fields. His wife hung on a few years before she died of grief.”

Hux stood slowly, turning away from the graves to face the sexton. “I’m obliged to you for directing me, Mister…??”

“Dameron.” The sexton pulled a work glove from his hand, stuck it out to shake Hux’s with a warm smile. “Poe Dameron, at your service.”

As he rode back in the dusk, Hux cursed every shadow he passed, every tree trunk that looked for an instant like a tall, black-clad figure in the gathering gloom of evening. “Damn you, Kylo Ren,” he hissed to the empty air. “You did this to me. Damn you. Why won’t you come?”

Two more days and Hux had finally had enough of waiting. He had sat beside his fire all night, turning the dagger over and over in his hand, catching the reflection of the flames in the polished silver blade. He had been thinking about his mother, her shrunken frame propped against pillows, not a trace of tenderness softening her features even on the edge of death. He thought of the way she had looked at him, rheumy eyes sharp with disappointment, and he imagined her parting her wrinkled lips to laugh at him, mockery in the hollow, joyless sound.

“You are a failure,” she hissed at him. “You cannot kill a monster. You cannot even save yourself.”

It was enough. Hux rose from his chair and tucked the dagger into his belt, then fetched his greatcoat and threw it over his shoulders. The servants, even Mitaka, had retired and he let himself out the doors and bounded down the steps, over the gravel and out onto the lawn, striding purposefully in the direction of the hill.

“Ben Solo!” he bellowed, pausing in the wet grass, the full moon hanging high above him in a starless black sky. “I demand you to show yourself! I summon you with your true name!” Hux’s voice rang across the park, high and reedy in the darkness. “Ben Solo, show yourself to me!”

The blades of grass stirred in the night breeze. Nothing else happened.

Hux walked on, drawing nearer and nearer to the hill. It was just a hill, just a rounded mound of earth and grass: no door gaped in its side, no light spilled out from its secret depths. But the moonlight filtered down through the leaves of the trees still standing on its crown and dappled in pale waves over the form of a man, black-haired and black-clad, standing in the semi-circle at the edge of the copse where a dozen or more trees had been cruelly felled by saws and axes and the reluctant labor of superstitious men. His cloak whipped against his boots and he waited, wordlessly, for Hux to ascend the slope and join him.

“I was waiting for you,” Ren said, his deep voice cutting into Hux, no longer inspiring fear but stirring a warm excitement along his spine, a sharp ache of need. “I didn’t come because you summoned me.”

“You’re a liar,” Hux countered, and Ren gave a small, sad smile. Hux swallowed, inhaled deeply, trying to slow his heartbeat, trying to steady his fingers which, beneath his coat, curled and uncurled around the hilt of the dagger. He ventured a few steps closer, watching the moonlight pool in Ren’s dark eyes.

“Did he tell you that it was me?” Ren asked suddenly. “My father? Did he tell you that I was the one who killed him?”

Hux didn’t ask how Ren had known about his visit from a dead man. Of course he would have known it. “I guessed it.”

“It was the final act, the last step in shifting off my mortality,” Ren told him. “To be accepted by them, to be one of them, I had to demonstrate that nothing bound me any longer to the rules, the strictures of humanity. So I waited for him in the pasture, the one he crossed every night after bringing in the cattle, on his way home to the cottage.” Ren drew a sharp breath and continued. “I stood before him and he called me his son, called me by my true name - and I denied him. I plunged the blade into his chest and watched him sink to the ground to die at my feet.”

“And did it work?” Hux asked. “Did it destroy your humanity? Your mortality?”

“Yes.” Then Ren’s full bottom lip trembled and the moonlight reflected in his eyes spilled down over his cheeks. “And no. I will live forever. And I will remember it forever: the feel of that knife tearing at my father’s heart. The warmth of his blood on my hands.”

Slowly Hux drew aside his greatcoat and pulled the dagger from his belt, holding it out so that Ren could see it. “This knife?”

Ren nodded. “Yes.”

Hux stepped closer. Only a foot or two of space separated their bodies, but Kylo Ren didn’t budge, didn’t flinch. “You know what I’ve come to do.”

Ren didn’t answer. He met Hux’s gaze steadily, without speaking. Then he tore at the silver brooch that fastened his cloak at the shoulder, ripped at the toggles that closed his tunic, grasped the two edges of the shirt and pulled them apart. “Do it,” he said, taking a step forward until the point of the knife rested against his sternum, indenting his flesh. “Do it! Free me from this unending darkness, this loneliness, this hell of remembering and regret.” He clasped Hux’s hand between his own, the hand that held the hilt, and he drew it harder against him, the point piercing, drops of blood bubbling up to trail over his snow-white skin. “If you feel anything for me, for God’s sake do it! Let me go!”

Hux closed his eyes. Gritting his teeth, he moved his hands against the hilt, his fingers, drenched in sweat, trembling with misery. The blade struck with a dull metallic ring, followed by a deep and horrible silence.

Hux opened his eyes. Kylo Ren’s eyes - Ben Solo’s eyes - stared into his own, their expression confused but free of anger, free of reproach. At the same time both men looked down: down at the knife that had tumbled downwards, striking the stone upon which it had come to rest.

“I cannot free you,” Hux said, and he took Ren’s face in his hands. “But I can make sure you’re never lonely again.”

Ren covered Hux’s hands with his own. “You don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t understand the immensity of it: to walk away from your life, the only life you’ve ever known - to become something other than human, something ancient and strange. You can never go back to your own people and you can never really be one of them. You and I and Phasma - the only humans among the Sith, for all of eternity. Can you fathom the loneliness of that? Can you?”

“But why, Ren?” And suddenly Hux smiled, Ren watching in bewilderment the expression of wickedness that passed like a beam of sunlight across his face. “Why must it be just you and I and Phasma? You think too small, my darling - that it what makes you so melancholy. There is a whole world of people around us, too many in fact: the cities are choked with them, the countryside too. Let us take them, one by one: reach out from the shadows and spirit them away, just as you were taken. Let us bring them here to live as our subjects, to swell our ranks. I saw the visions when I touched you, Ren. I saw the old ways, the way it was once when the world was young. The Sith held sway, and so they can again. Make me your seneschal, let me rule at your right hand, and together we will take back all that ever belonged to the Sith, and more besides.”

Ren stared at him for a moment, then leaned forward impulsively and kissed him. Hux fell against Ren, fell into his arms, and they clasped one another, standing like young trees unbent by the wind that passed over the crown of the hill.

When he broke away Hux knelt down at his Ren’s feet and took both of his hands. Slowly, tenderly, he drew the black gloves from Ren’s fingers and pressed a kiss into both palms. “All that I possess I pledge to you, Kylo Ren, my lord and master. These lands, that house, all of my servants. All of my soul.” He looked up at Ren and brushed his face against those long, pale fingers, parted his lips to taste Ren’s strong, broad knuckles, the blood rushing through the prominent veins in his wrists. “My body and my soul I pledge to my lord and master. Now and forevermore.”

Ren drew his hands gently away from Hux, passed his fingertips down his cheeks, through his hair. “I have longed for the sun,” he said quietly. “I have spent so long among them, in the night and under the earth, that it burns when it touches me. It burns when you touch me, too. But that is a fire I can endure.” He drew Hux to his feet. “You’ll bring the sun to me.”

“I’ll be your sun,” Hux promised.

Their lips met again and for a long time, a thousand years maybe - Hux neither knew nor cared - they were one body, breathing one breath. Then the door opened in the side of the hill, the white light spilled out and, arm in arm, they went home.


	9. Epilogue

She had been alone so long that the loneliness no longer plagued her. She still felt it, a dull ache in her bones, but it was just another part of life, of living: as normal as the sun rising in the morning, as frost on the grass after a cold winter night. The memories of the time when she had not been alone, when there had been other voices in the cottage, laughter and warm embraces, were so faint they were like shadows beneath distant trees: flickering, uncertain, disappearing in a slant of light.

That summer morning she went out early, to gather mushrooms and dig for wild onions before the sun climbed to its zenith and overheated the air. She could spend the hottest part of the day in the shade of the cottage that way, mending a hole in the sole of her boot with her deft fingers while she answered the calling birds in their own language. She was a gifted mimic and as she walked through the forest, stepping lightly over decaying logs and rivulets of rainwater, she imitated the songs of the robin and the sparrow, the blue jay and the chickadee. Other creatures, too: she made the chucking cry of the squirrel, the snuffling grunt of the wild pig. She laughed at herself for this, and just as a test – to see if she remembered how, for it had been so long since she’d had need to – she played the part of a human being, one that wasn’t alone, one that had reason to speak. Clearing her throat she said loudly to the surrounding trees:

“How are you this fine morning?”

She never expected any of her calls to be answered. So her surprise was very great when this last one was.

“Very well. And how are you?”

The man was leaning against the trunk of a crooked oak, his arms crossed on his chest. He was smiling at her, his green eyes sparkling in a narrow shaft of sunlight that fell down through the thick roof of leaves. He was young and handsome, pale-skinned, his hair a bright ginger, and he was dressed all in black: silky black shirt and breeches, tall black boots.

She stopped, jolted by surprise. “I-- Forgive me. I didn’t-- I didn’t expect to meet anyone out here.”

The man’s smile grew broader. “There’s nothing to forgive. And an unexpected meeting is always a pleasant one, don’t you think?”

She struggled to find the right words, it having been so long since she’d been called to use any of them. “Yes. I suppose.”

“I heard you, singing like a bird as you came nearer,” the man said. “You’re very good. I heard a jay and a robin and a sparrow, I think. Am I correct?”

“And a chickadee,” she said, delighted by his recognition of her calls. “They’re small, round birds, with black and white feathers.”

“Ah. Do you like birds?”

“Yes, very much.”

“And other wild creatures?”

“Yes indeed.”

The man smiled again. “I know of a creature that lives in these woods. The wildest, strangest, most beautiful creature of all. I’ll bet you’ve never seen its like.”

She bristled at this. “I’ve seen every kind of creature that dwells in these woods.”

The man raised one elegant eyebrow. “Are you certain of that? This creature is very rare. And very elusive. If you should like to see it, it may often be found just in there, at the end of that corridor of trees.”

She looked where he pointed. She had passed the spot many times before and, though she had rambled through the woods every day of her life and the shadows beneath the tall trees held no fear for her, it was a place that she had never dared to venture. There was something strange about it, about the way the two rows of birches grew in straight, parallel lines as if forming a road or corridor; something odd, too, in the way the point in the distance where the lines met seemed perpetually shrouded in white mist.

“What sort of creature is it?” she asked, hesitating, staring hard at the man.

“I told you. The most remarkable creature.” He paused thoughtfully. “A creature that can make you feel less alone.”

“What makes you think I feel alone?” she demanded.

The ginger-haired man laughed. It was not a mocking laugh, not cruel; it was simply the laugh of one who has caught another in an obvious lie. “There’s no shame in it, you know. And besides – they’ve all come away, haven’t they? The friends that you did have. That bright, handsome boy Finn, with his easy laugh and his kindness. You fancied him, I think. Then the sexton from the village church, Poe Dameron, who gave you a nosegay of wildflowers whenever he met you on some country road. Even that little orange and white mongrel that used to dance around your feet and come begging for scraps from your door…”

She gaped at him in astonishment. “How did you know about them?”

“You thought they’d moved away, to another village,” the man continued, ignoring her question. “Moved away without telling you, without saying goodbye. Even the dog had abandoned you. But that wasn’t it at all. They are close at hand, and they are eager to see you. Just there.” And he pointed again at the strange avenue of trees. “All you have to do is walk in there and you can meet your friends again.”

She hesitated, staring at the trees, at the point where the lines converged: a hazy space, lost behind an impenetrable fog. But she was afraid of nothing. She couldn’t have survived for so long had she been afraid, and besides that-- She had not realized until that very moment how terribly lonely she felt.

Turning away from the ginger-haired man, she strode briskly down the corridor of birches, head held high. The trees seemed to stretch on before her, their meeting point to recede, but soon enough she felt the fog against her skin, watched it envelop her body, passing for a moment thick and white before her eyes. And then she stood – no longer in the corridor of birches – but in a twilit clearing between massive oaks, fireflies dancing like hovering candles in the air around her head.

Finn was not there. Nor Poe. Nor the fat little mongrel dog. But there was someone…

He was a strange and beautiful man: tall and imposing in figure, clad all in softly shimmering black robes. His thick hair was black, contrasting sharply with the paleness of his skin. His eyes, too, were dark, almost black in the shadows of the grove: but his lips were a soft pink, full and luscious. She felt a strange sensation inside of her as she looked at him, an odd sort of tingling excitement that she had never experienced before: it was something between fear and fascination, dread and curiosity.

“What’s your name?” he asked her, his voice deep and soft.

She smiled. “Rey.”

The man held out a black-gloved hand to her. “I have a great hall, Rey, and many subjects who should like to make your acquaintance. Everyday we feast and every night we dance. Your friends are already there and they are waiting to receive you. Will you come with me and my seneschal, my consort? Will you come and be our guest?”

Her mind urged caution, told her to hesitate: but her heart pounded with excitement and her hand slid, almost of its own accord, into his own. The ginger-haired man appeared beside her and he exchanged a knowing smile with the other man, their eyes meeting with an expression that was warm and familiar. Then the man in the black robes offered the ginger-haired man his other hand and, together, they led Rey away into the mist.


End file.
